In the months before our 3 day sounding lab we sporadically exchanged references that excited us, stuff we’d read, artists that interest us, workshops we’d led or attended, observations from making new work..
references included: Denis Smalley – Spectromorphology: explaining sound shapes (1997 Camb Uni Press); Undercurrents: the Hidden Wiring of Modern Music (continuum/The Wire); SOUND edited by Caleb Kelly (Whitechapel Gallery); Notations 21 – Theresa Sauer (http://www.notations21.net/); The Phenomenology of Perception – Merleau Ponty (Routledge)
..all things we were subconciously storing as background for finding our collaborative space together which we reached into on our first day: sharing influences, sharing practice, triggering conversation through reading outloud .. adjusting to being in a soundproof room (that surprisingly had it’s own weird clicks) and sensing our way towards collaboration.
We left a digital recorder on continuously while we worked inside and outside, so that we were free to make the most of these moments of moving towards collaboration and of creating the beginnings of a joint methodology.
Claire is a Glasgow based composer, musician and facilitator. She is director of Sonic Bothy (http://atelierpublic.wordpress.com/artists/claire-docherty-sonic-bothy/). Her practice centres around collectively creating new music often in cross-discipline contexts. Jane is a multi-disciplinary artist with a focus on participatory and interactive sound works (www.janepitt.co.uk/proj.html). We met through a ground breaking project called Abrupt Encounters (http://www.abruptencounters.com/?p=658) working with artists with learning differences at Artlink Central, Stirling, Scotland. We live at opposite ends of the UK. This AIR a-n New Collaborations Bursary gave us the opportunity to come together to share conversation and questions around our practices; do some deep 360 degree listening & vocalising (or ‘sounding’); soundmap and document the soundscape as potential score; get to grips with how we filter and embody our perception of environments through sound and touch on how we can interpret this into a meaningful immersive sonic experience for audiences. The University of Glasgow Music Dept kindly allowed us use of a sound proof room, so we were able to dislocate the sounds we’d perceived and gathered outside and work on translating them through instrumentation & drawing in silence without extraneous sonic interference.
