| All things make music
with their lives.
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I
hear the soundscape as a language with which places and societies
express themselves. In the face of rampant noise pollution,
I want to be understanding and caring of this "language"
and how it is "spoken."
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| I transform sound
in order to highlight its original contours and meanings, similar
to the manner in which a caricaturist sharpens the contours
and our perceptions of a person's face.
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| Sometimes, I get shy
and tell people I'm a "nature sound recordist." But
actually, I'm a composer for the instrument—or orchestra
of instruments—called "nature." And, I'm composing
through the whole process of my work.
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It took me ten years to learn to record ocean
waves.
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If you manage to block out all sound, you will have no trouble
looking around at the warp and woof of the world, but you will
feel an outsider, detached from the goings on. Sound puts us
into the picture, or makes the picture more than an image. As
the Inuit asks the visitor coming in out of the cold: speak
so that I may see you. Add a voice, even a whisper, so that
the other is really there.
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I hug my knees to my chest and close my eyes, listening to the
sound of the river. Or the sounds of the river. I try to pick
up each contributing harmony, rhythm, and cadence; the slap
of water on the canyon wall, the ripple as it washes upon the
bank, the steady rush of it downstream...[MORE]
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I transform sound in order to highlight its
original contours and meanings, similar to the manner in which
a caricaturist sharpens the contours and our perceptions of
a person's face.
My take on all of this is trying to elevate soundscape recording
as an art genre, in the same way that photography was recognized
in the 1920's.
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Sound is wonderful, because, different than
sight (which is also beautiful, of course), sound connects
things, and sound accommodates many voices at one time and
they remain intelligible. Whereas with sight, we see one object,
and very rarely do we actually have transparencies and reflections.
Sound, as a medium, aesthetically allows us to experience
environment as connections between living things, and cycles,
and rhythms.
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| I compose with any
sound that the environment offers to the microphone, just as
a writer works with all of the words that a language provides.
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I have mixed feelings. . . . Part of this
is the idea of being able to expand access to the non-human
world in a way which is non-destructive; the other side of
it is that it ends up being another level of exploitation
and commodotizing the environment in the same way we've commodotized
every other aspect of it.
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