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sonic mapping

Sonic Mapping

One of the pleasures of writing an independent blog is the fact that I can cover topics I know absolutely nothing about, simply because I find them fascinating. You, of course, have a similar choice: you can explore new territory or decide to skip it, since it might involve some effort to listen in new ways. And listen it shall be: this week I am introducing a number of different artists who employ sound in order to map aspects of our world as linked to the past, present and future, or to capture ephemeral processes.

What they all have in common is that they are art – devised as sound sculptures in some cases, associated with visual images (painted, sculpted or digitally created) in others, or plain compositions using sound collected from the environment or electronically generated. I cannot tell if I am more fascinated by some of the underlying ideas, or the art works that result from the ideas. I guess it varies.

Today I will start with two artists who are about the present and the past. Wednesday’s segment will introduce two artists who explore the linkage between sound and psychological processes extending into the future. The two installments are meant as a package, examining working with sound from four different angles. I don’t expect anyone to listen to any of the links in full – that would cost a lot of time – but a bit of sampling will give you a taste of what’s out there and maybe instill curiosity for more.

Composer Bill Fontana is one of the pioneers of sound art in the U.S. with a career spanning five decades and taking him to international acclaim. He collects site-specific sounds and generates sound configurations from those recordings that reflect aspects of the site and are intended to shape our visual interaction with the site or visual surrounding. Working with acoustic microphones, underwater sensors (hydrophones) and structural/material sensors (accelerometers) that sample the environmental sounds, he creates “sculptures” with the input, musical transformations that are centrally experienced by the listener.

For example, he has composed subtle variations of the music of the Golden Gate Bridge, a live audio/video installation created for its 75th anniversary in 2012, now in the collection of SF MOMA. Here is a link to some of his acoustical visions – the bridge piece can be heard in the third segment.

Another sound sculpture can be found in Rome, in the entry hall of the National Museum of 21st Century Art. He connects Zaha Hadid’s architecture of the building with the acoustic, harmonic and rhythmical qualities of the water that has run in Roman aqueducts since time immemorial. Well, since Roman times. Ok, 2000 years.

You can hear the sculptural sound and the underlying source here.

Miami Beach at Night

And here is a link to one of his most recent projects, Sonic Dreamscapes that connects sounds of the Miami seascape under threat of climate change to our auditory cortex, making the listener aware of the fragility of our world. This multimedia installation was installed in Miami Beach in 2018.

The installation cycle begins during the day with individually recurring auditory recordings answering each other from different spatial points in SoundScape Park. By afternoon, the “musical vocabulary” will grow as additional sounds are added to the repertoire. As the evening approaches, environmentally inspired abstract videos will emerge on the video wall, allowing visitors to experience a myriad of floating sounds and meditative images.

Where Fontana is about connecting us to the sound of places with an eye on change across time, Satch Hoyt is a sound artist concerned with the sounds of people, their movements across space in the past and preserved echos in contemporary music. In addition to actual sculptures that interact with sound installations (link here, scroll down and click on the strips below the images to get to the sound,) Hoyt has an ongoing multi-media project in the works, Afro-Sonic Mapping, which traces specific traditional African music from centuries ago to the contemporary musical styles of the African diaspora.

Street Art in Berlin
Remembering Colonial Times….

The project connects archival recordings of African music from Congo and Angola, collected by European anthropologists of the late 1800s and found in Berlin’s ethnology museum, to the urban music in the suburbs of large contemporary Portuguese and Brazilian cities. Turns out, the musical patterns transmigrated to today’s urban music, linking Luanda, Lisbon and Salvador da Bahia, or Dakar, Cali and Lima. With examination of aural histories, interviews and musical exploration with local African musicians to whom Hoyt brought the old recordings, and with collaboration with modern musicians across continents, he re-imagined the sounds, rhythms and melodies, rarely recorded in bygone periods of colonialism and slave trade.

Two years ago the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin offered the first large presentation of the project. Paintings, lectures, videos and 2 concerts attracted big crowds across a full week. Here is some of the music interspersed with an explanatory interview with the artist. The focus was on the lusophone triangle, between the large Portuguese speaking regions of the word, Portugal, its former African colonies (Angola, Mozambique) and Brazil, mapping the sounds, back and forth. I am not sure that Hoyt’s goal to “bring back the music to the places of origin where it was recorded and create some kind of sonic restitution in a postcolonial world, a transformation,” can be accomplished, I certainly would not know how to judge that.

But I find the idea of mapping the network of historical pathways of rhythms or melodies which were, other than language, the only things that could be brought and kept during torturous migrations, fascinating. Musicians acting as archeologists, digging out old artifacts under layers of later civilizations. Sounds of spaces or historical sounds, recorded and re-coded for us to sharpen our listening, to form connections – art as mediator.

Photographs today are of San Francisco, Miami and Berlin, respectively; the Democratic Republic of Congo has to wait for another life time….

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Sonic Spectres

Let me add to the lot of mind-boggling concepts I introduced this week – Fontana’s sound sculptures made of environment-specific noises, Hoyt’s Afro-Sonic Mapping, the Caretaker’s musical representations of the slide into dementia – one more maven who is a game changer with communicating ideas by means of auditory output: Kristen Gallerneaux.

To call her a renaissance woman is likely an understatement. She is a sound-based artist, curator, and sonic researcher with a Ph.D. in Art Practice & Media History (UC San Diego), an MA in Folklore (University of Oregon), and an MFA in Art (Wayne State University), as well as the Curator of Communication and Information Technology at The Henry Ford Museum in Detroit, Michigan, where she is in charge of one of the largest historical technology collections in North America. She writes for a variety of scholarly and popular journals, and her 2018 book High Static, Dead Lines was well received.

One of the most fascinating aspects of her explorations is for me the fact that this highly educated, scientifically versed woman does not shy away from topics that might elicit eye-rolling at best and ridicule at worst among her academic peers: the pursuit of sounds associated with a paranormal culture, the possibility of sonic spectres, the idea that objects have a life of their own beyond their relationship to humans (object-oriented ontology.)

I don’t care where unusual interests get started – in her case perhaps with the confluence of upbringing in a Spiritualist household, the lasting damage done to her hearing by badly treated childhood diseases that led to sound-distortions or – generation, or an immersion in folklore and/or narratives from her Métis ancestry (the folks from intermarriage between the first French settlers and the indigenous populations of her native Canada.) I do admire when those interests become passions, ignoring academic head winds and/or popular approval while searching for answers for tricky questions. And I gladly expose myself to unusual topics when they are offered in an approachable way, with clarity, directness and lack of pretensions, as her work does in spades, writing and compositions alike. Plus how can you not be curios about an artist who answers the question of whether she believes in the supernatural with this gem:

“…as for the question “Do you or do you not believe?,” I usually find myself citing one of my particularly witchy academic mentors, who once said, “I don’t believe in ghosts, but I’ve met them plenty.” It perfectly summed up my noncommittal, gray-zone syncretic beliefs.” 

One of my favorite examples of her work is a sound and video exploration of a phenomenon called The Hum. Perhaps acoustic, perhaps psychological, it is a consistent, low-pitched noise or vibration, experienced by a small percentage of people across the world (often plagued by subsequent dizziness, headaches and insomnia) – in Auckland and Taos, in Bristol and until 2020 in Windsor, Ontario. You can find a worldwide map of reports here. Most dispatches come from urban areas, which suggests it might be industrial or urban low frequency noise pollution. Except it isn’t. There are not many scientific studies of this experience, but the ones that we have exclude natural sources (aurorae, lightning, meteors, volcanoes, waterfalls and ocean waves) as well as radio waves or microwave equivalents. Acoustic sources are unlikely, because if you bring multiple Hum experiencers into a room they all match the Hum to different acoustic frequencies. People are now exploring internal neurological processes for lack of satisfying external signal explanations, but here and now we simply do not know what’s going on. One might, of course, ask why should Auckland, for example, have a higher percentage of people with internal neurological quirks than, say, Sidney? Or why does the Hum disappear when industrial steel mills cease operations (like they did last year in Windsor, Canada?)

In any case the black& white video about the Hum is a terrific example of being open to variable explanations and pursuing them with intellectual rigor as well as visual tricks that allow us to believe in gray zones, after all.

For once, let me run with a wild fantasy. Let’s assume we organize a scéance and Gallerneaux is willing to attend. She might want to call on communing with Caroline Furness Jayne. Who, you ask? Jaynes is the author of a 1906 book on string figures, found globally. Known to us as cat’s cradle, they come in immense variations, and are apparently developed completely independently across world cultures. We know little about Jayne (bios are padded with info about her more famous parents and/or son) other than that she was interested in ethnological studies, a consummate traveler, dead for unknown reasons at age 36. Inspired by anthropologist Frans Boas, she researched scientific papers on string figures and published an anthology with places, names and instructions on how to generate these complicated cat’s cradles. You can find the book and the drawings here. And Gallineaux recently released music (Strung Figures, a terrific album) based on the book and those string figures, at the artist’s band camp site.

Surprise! Not Jayne, it is Harry Everett Smith who appears. (I’ve never attended a scéance, so give me some slack in making this all up.) Who he? Come on: The Magus with a magpie mind, as someone once called him, compiled the six-record collection Anthology of American Folk Music. But he was also declared to be an “anthropologist, ethnomusicologist, abstract painter, experimental filmmaker, and full-time eccentric. Smith’s interest in exposing unseen connections — his own form of artistic alchemy — drew him to create artwork that brought together diverse elements in new and exciting combinations.”(Ref.)

Sounds like a soul mate to Gallineaux, particularly when you now add that he was deeply interested in all things occult and worked with string figures. Here is a sampling from an exhibition of his string figures in Brooklyn, 9 years ago. Smith left an unfinished thousand-page manuscript on the practice, with some plainly false claims, I’d add, having skimmed some excerpts. But I’m sure he and today’s sound artist would have a lot to talk about.

Except that he, eschewing academics, might not grasp the mathematical connections to knot theory, and pictorial topology. I bet the bank she would. And, more importantly, be able to teach all of us about it in ways that we can grasp. In the meantime, let’s go dance to Finger Catch from Strung Figures.

Photographs today from fields of dried grass, windswept, where the only noise other than the occasionally lowing cow was the rustle when the breeze appeared. How could it not remind me of visualized sound waves?

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Water is the Shovel of the Shore

Need a break from the tumult of this month, this year, from politics, war, pandemics? Never mind the nail biting over the run-off election in Georgia, as I write this?

I have just the thing – something to listen to that offers gorgeous, thoughtful music, surprising with the ease and elegance with which it fluctuates between traditional and experimental sound. The Water is the Shovel of the Shore provides at times a calming mix of folk tunes and natural sound and then it shifts to provocative ways to make you think about the historical implications of our relationship to water, the way it nourishes, punishes, bringing life as well as death.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

OK, maybe not a break from politics, war and disease, after all, but time spent that fills you with beauty and, ultimately, hope for liberation from our burdens. The album is at its most effective if you reserve time to listen consciously, not just in the background. Even better with headphones, so many artistic subtleties otherwise hard to notice.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And in the department of “How could this be?”: it is again music that usually does not draw me in, namely one based in folk songs and rooted in British, Scottish, Irish and in this instance Guyanese tradition, beautifully sung both in chorus and solos. (The other was Simmerdim, reviewed here earlier.) The answer to that question is easy: the music goes way beyond tradition and explores and integrates progressive approaches to communicating with sound. It is thematically digging deep into our relationship with water, and artistically varied enough to satisfy my everlasting hunger for intellectual stimulation that does not come at the expense of emotional connection. The album serves both. Come to think of it, it feeds bits of my soul as well, given that it reminds me of formative times spent in England while still young and links to my collage work since 2019 which focussed on ships and water in climate change and pandemic contexts. (All images today are from the various series, using my photographs of ships, landscapes and paintings to be combined into photomontages, printed on German etching paper.)

In the Harbor From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

The nine-person folk ensemble Shovel Dance Collective has made a splash on the scene after only a few years of existence, as evidenced in the glowing music reviews found everywhere. Much to be learned for us uninitiated, from the fact that folk tunes have no fixed composers and thus are open to reinterpretation across centuries, to the fact that love and loss seemed to be always anchored as a dyad in traditional folk songs.

I didn’t need the insights from the reviews, though, to be reminded that labor in all of its nuances and burdens was a traditional topic in folk music. Related to water you have the sea shanties, of course, easing the strenuous work load on merchant marine and war ships (thus extracting more labor, in the end), but the music also reminds of the dangers of industrial work, in harbors, oil rigs, and the likes.

From the series The Whale’s Perspective (2022)

And water’s gruesome role in the perishing of human beings exemplifies what this album manages to pull off: showing that exploitation, violent oppression, denial of rights to anyone outside the ruling class are not relegated to history, as captured in traditional song. An estimated 2 million slaves perished during the Atlantic passage. (I will never get over the fact that cargo insurance did not cover ill slaves or those killed by disease while covering drowned slaves – leading to throwing sick ones alive into the ocean for profit even from their death (Ref.) Maybe a small number of all killed overall, but showing the extent of the profit motive in the barbarism of slavery. )

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

Not just the past. Of today’s refugees crossing the Mediterranean, 25.313 have died since 2014 and, closer to home, over 800 have perished this year alone by drowning in the Rio Grande or the opposite – lack of water leading to heat death in their approach to the US border.) There is an unbroken chain of themes that these musicians bring to the fore in contemporary fashion, enduring content in marvelously adapted form.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

The link between history and our present times is amplified by the various sound scapes recorded from rivers, harbor activity and other sources that firmly anchor the music by Alex Mckenzie, Daniel S. Evans, Fidelma Hanrahan, Jacken Elswyth, Joshua Barfoot, Mataio Austin Dean, Nick Granata, Oliver Hamilton and Tom Hardwick-Allan.

Integrating real life sound into music, or creating compositions made up entirely of that kind of sound, has been around for almost 80 years now, with the French broadcast technician Pierre Schaeffer recognized as the father of this musique concrète movement. Here is one of his extraordinary compositions using but train sounds, étude aux chemins de fer. Water was a preferred sound then already – here is one of my favorites, Hugh Le Caine’s Dripsody (for tape) from 1955. Most of us were likely more familiar with the inclusion of extraneous sounds in the realm of more commercial pop music. Remember the traffic noises appearing in the 1966 Loving Spoonful’s Summer in the City? Or the extraneous sounds so dominant in many albums by Frank Zappa, We’re Only In It For The Money, Lumpy Gravy to Uncle Meat included, way before he hooked up with Pierre Boulez, the French composer who is seen as one of Pierre Schaeffer’s successors? (For the fun of it, and I know I’m getting sidelined here, but since I am a fan: Here is Zappa’s Cough Drop commercial using musique concrète. )

Back to he Shovel Dance Collective. The immutable sounds of nature juxtaposed with the arrival of modern aural landscapes, from junkyard work next to Dartford Creek, or rigging and reeds at Erith Marina, to tourists feeding gulls, ferry noises east from London Bridge, and clergy of Southwark Cathedral and St Magnus the Martyr blessing the Thames capture continuity and change, with music as a mode that embraces both, water the vehicle to ferry that idea across, having us gently float on the stream of evolution.

From the series Setting Sail (2020)

As my regular readers know, I have become interested in acoustic ecology recently, given what I learned about Sonic Mapping, Sonic Spectres, Sound Analogies and Sound Variations. This album adds beauty to it all. For me, an awesome find. 

Pacific Sights (Los Angeles) From the series Postcards from Nineveh (2019)

Listen to the Water is the Shovel of the Shore here.

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