getting inside sound

We’re standing halfway up a stairway that weaves it’s way sharply and narrowly from the leafy street through the modernist backside of buildings; we’re under a tall tree canopy, the rear of 19th C town houses stream away to our right, angular concrete towers up ahead and blocks the way to our left.

The previous day we’d talked about how the practice of ‘sounding’ together makes us stand differently in the world & map our space there differently, it extends our practice, pares away the barriers between our internal consciousness and the outside so that our skin seems paper thin.

So now we slip into that skin; eyes closed, focusing our listening gradually in all directions, tuning in and out, emitting sounds, extending vocal technique & testing new mouth shapes for noisemaking, receiving, transmitting, merging into the soundscape. This time we don’t map with marks; eyes closed we’re sensing, embodying and interpreting the volume of the space through our auditory and vocal processing. Temporarily depriving our visual sense heightens our awareness of the velocity, stasis, flow, movement & trajectory of sound & it’s relationship to the architecture, it’s emphemerality. Time passes. Eyes open, in silence we walk back down to the soundproof room.

It’s important not to talk, to hold the outdoor experience in our minds, not to bring structured spoken language into the room. We’d prepared ‘materials’ before going out; violin, paper rolls, piano, coloured pens, harp.. C goes straight to playing violin, extending her technique to interpret more clearly, at moments she’s clearly playing sounds that come from the same source as J’s drawing; J draws while vocalising, mouth tight & wide; both raid the pile of pens to get the right sound colour; J records each new mark with a photo as if making frames for stop motion; C moves to the harp then goes back to drawing a column of sound, J tries the harp, returns to drawing. Total immersion.

Then we talk: conscious of blocks of ‘colour’; how the disappearance of a sound affects one’s sense of the architectural space; how one sound can suddenly roll across all the others; some sounds caused strong geometric shapes to form in the mind; how C playing enabled J to project back to the ‘sounding’ place; the incongruence of sounds within the frame of listening i.e. in real space a plane is high up (in the sky) but the booming drone is pitched low; our growing ability to seperate out the elements that make up a compound sound; needing 3 weeks not 3 days etc..

In reality we did this action twice, for the same duration in the same places and were able to make comparisons in our experiences and documentation that will inform where we go next.

Our Soundlab gave us the opportunity to cement the shift to a collaborative practice. It really was intense and short, so our next step is to fund some more residency time somehow (Ideas welcome!).

We’d planned to share our outcomes in a discussion with a small group of Uni tutors and live arts producer friends/artists on our last afternoon, but a combination of academic holidays and a sad bereavement made that impossible on the day. In fact we were grateful of the extra time this gave us, putting us in a stronger position to move forward with a sci-art project in collaboration with Dr M. Proulx (Cog Sci, Uni Bath). We’ll continue to share our collaborative progress with our critical friends over time.

Ongoing reading references.. ‘The Production of Space’ – Henri Lefebvre, ‘Noise in and as music’ – University Huddesfield

These maps describe our synchronised listening experiences. We’re used to listening and then vocalising an immediate interpretation of a place together with groups but this exercise allowed us to listen and map in silence.

We’d done some exploration of various spaces with different resonances on the way to the listening site, like the Uni cloisters but chose this spot for it’s elevation, which gave us a far reaching soundscape flanked behind by the imposing Uni Bell tower and opening out in front over Kelvingrove Park towards the Clyde and Govan and stretching way out to our left & right sides.

We’d set out to listen and vocalise but somehow without talking about it began to make soundmaps instead.

The action of documenting something as mutable as a soundscape brings into play a lot of cognitive processes causing an inherent delay between hearing & making the mark. Between hearing and interpreting sound to colour, shape, texture, word; between hearing and deciding how to translate the duration and location of the sound. How to describe the field of listening in which to locate all these sounds, how to bring the sense of immersion in the immense layers of time and space as a non-linear experience, each element of sound inextricably linked in that moment to the others, the shifts as one sound drops out or an extra one arrives. We took different approaches to map making which really helped us to understand, share and analyse the processes we’d gone through while sitting side by side pushing our listening limits.

Opening up your ears to profound listening is one thing, neither of us has yet found a method of de-sensitising them so we returned to our soundproof room to look at and instrumentalise our maps.

We’d both been thinking about the construction or architecture of a sound work while we were mapping, and particularly with this inherent delay in recording our listening experience.. how to compositionally integrate the information in terms of musical flow..writing or scoring in order for them to play within their realm of experience and for it not to become stop-start-this-noise-that-noise; and what types of sounds have what effect – pitch rhythm, volume, stasis, sustain, decay. What information to keep what to leave out.

Claire intended her spherical map to be a straight forward representation of actuality – metal things, trees etc.. through which she could push her listening, she found there was a block (possibly a building?) at around 2/3rds.. Jane felt a need to do several overlaid layers of transparent maps to get closer to 3 dimensions, feeling a frustration in having to record everything on one page as recording each new piece of sonic information in 2D risked obliterating earlier marks in the urgency of responding to the immediacy of the soundscape. Whether a sound happened for a second or 20mins it all ends up on the map.

These maps were a great aid to describing how & what each of us hears and how our disciplines affect that. Combining our perceptions got us much closer to getting inside sounds.

In advance of our post about making sound maps and where we made them, here’s a link to a couple of clips from the ambient field recording made while we ‘mapped’, for you to fill your ears. Best listen with headphones.

(Having some trouble uploading audio files to this post, so if this link to soundcloud doesn’t work copy and paste into your browser!)

https://soundcloud.com/jane-pitt/sets/air-a-n-new-collaborations-ambient-flagpole-clips-1-2

One of our aims for this new collaboration is to look at graphic scoring, visual documentation, interpretation and mapping of sound. We want to explore useful ways of having a record of the sounds we find and make in order to know what sort of ‘score’ to produce for the musicians and vocalists who will eventually perform works that emerge from this joint methodology.

We talked about the problems of representation and how ‘writing freezes the experience of temporal flux’ as well as thinking about the audience’s ‘wayward aural attentiveness during the sounding flow of music’ and that a score could be like a ‘bundle of conceptual tools’(D.Smalley) accessed equally by player and audience.

Claire has investigated improvising from a number of graphic scores, sometimes alone and a few in ensemble. Some scores seem to consistently create very specific sound worlds, and some much more in flux. Jane makes soundmaps using colour, mark and texture to record a soundscape but has never vocalised from them or had a musician play them. So Notations 21 – Theresa Sauer is a good place to start a collaborative enquiry, if you’ve not seen the book look online here: (http://www.notations21.net/) . It contains extremely different graphic scores. Claire chose one by Kerry John Andrews because ‘..it doesn’t have gestural flow’ ‘the colours played into it a lot in deciding where to start and what dynamics you’re using, pitch, sound..’ Jane was drawn to Morgan O’Hara’s ‘Live Transmission’ score for a megaphone, a complex, stimulating, series of tight pencil marks denoting some kind of spatial volume that Claire saw/heard as ‘throbbing’. http://www.morganohara.com/

Because a graphic score is open to interpretation and less ‘fixed’ than traditional notation each playing of it will be unique. As with all scores “the piece is not the score, the house is not the architect’s blueprint”, having less common language routes than traditional notation and involving much more of a process of ‘making’, interpretations can make for very different pieces.

Potentially anything can be a score, your face, the wall, a sink mat.

How people filter their perception of the environment is key to our work together. Considering audience and musicians as active perceivers receiving & processing multiple data not units in space.

Definition & Concepts in Denis Smalley – Spectromorphology, acted as a stepping off point for discussing this idea of ‘Perceivers’ in relation to compositional thinking. How we perceive also opens up the questions of how we embody an experience, what embodiment is and equally what information is embedded in us that enables us to create. How we organise ourselves sensorily to create a sound and finding ways to override the history we bring to creating sound.

Then Claire described Maggie Nichols method of compositional improvisation ‘Scribbling’ that somehow in it’s immediacy she experienced a bypassing of player-consciousness to access a deeper vocal language through the instrument. Perhaps Jane’s method of site specific ‘Soundings’ has as a similar impetus? There’s something so immediate about using the voice for getting the sound out, for externalising raw cognitive input, what sound shapes are happening, texture, gesture etc..

..and so our next collaborative actions emerge: 360º listening and soundmappingto befollowed bydeep listening outdoors – vocalising the perceived environment in situ – returning to the soundproof room to channel that through instruments and drawings.

As reference here’s some documentation of a workshop we did previously with a group finding ways to vocally sonify objects, which threw up a lot of questions about which senses (rather than individual sense) we each channel our perceptions through: http://www.janepitt.co.uk/trans-space/2014/02/12/filtering-perception/