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
