Author: Harvey Young

I recorded an alleyway near my house where rats often scuttle through. I used a contact mic and a parabolic mic to capture the objects they came into contact with and the overall sound of the movement. I brought that to the session but found they lacked the potency to cut through the mix, even when processed and amplified, so I added a series of recordings of me rubbing my hands together just to flesh out the sound. I bussed all these sounds to an EQ plugin, amongst others, and automated it as the track played to achieve a sharp textural variation. There are sudden spikes in the high band frequencies and then sudden cuts. This technique is used to enhance the feeling of animalistic chaos. I decided to order the piece as Intrusion, Fervour, Placidity. I knew I wanted to create a kind of thematic tension and release, and therefore chose placidity to end it with. I have been imagining how to translate this idea to a gallery setting, and I definitely want to do something that involves the audience feeling as though they’ve been physically placed in to the sound. If they have the opportunity to spatially and compositionally interact with the piece that could prove to be interesting.

Part of my inspiration for the idea of the suite came from a lesson where we were shown many examples of multichannel work. One that stuck to me was a composition that evoked the idea of multichannel sound in sonata form – featuring exposition, development and recapitulation. An accompanying quote read “Sound particles dissolve the rigid blocks of musical composition – the notes and their intervals – into more fluid and supple materials”. This quote was very pertinent to me in my compositional process. I wanted to apply it to my use of extended vocal technique – the idea that my microtonal, often dissonant singing was dissolving the rigid blocks of musical composition, the notes and the intervals. As I sat down to write the composition I knew I wanted to use the results of the exercise I had done a few weeks before. In my head, fervour was going to be the second section of the suite, but I decide to start working on it first as it felt the idea was the most potent, yet the most ephemeral and fleeting. I split the signal of a Prophet synth, DI and mic’d up through a delay and a reverb pedal, and doubled the track with a virtual polyphonic VST synth to create a textural bed to the piece. I then tracked what eventually amounted to 36 vocal lines over the top. I recorded from the top register to the bottom, and from the most abrasive and dissonant examples of extended vocal technique, to the cleanest and smoothest examples of straightforward singing. I felt it very accurately crystallised the notion of fervour I was trying to capture, and harked back to the idea of the sonics of encroachment due to its often carnal and bodily sounding textures. I wanted to create a lyric line to cut through the dense mix. I was inspired by the Choosing Companions portion of Meredith Monk’s opera Atlas, which used very blunt, mechanical and humorous styles of writing, yet managed to retain a real wistfulness and emotional potency. I liked this blend and wanted to write something that evoked a similar selection of feelings. The lyrics I wrote were “I’m starting to get to grips with all this bureaucracy / It’s starting to make sense to me / I respect and fear the methodology”. 

I have been spending lots of time consuming the work of Meredith Monk and Joan La Barbara, two heroes of mine in the sound art and extended vocal technique world. Listening to La Barbara’s Tapesong has helped me to flesh out my understanding of extended vocal technique. I’ve been experimenting with this world for about a year now. Much of what I write vocally is consonant, taking influence from jazz and the folk tradition, as well as monody and Gregorian plainchant. I like to write melodies as a separate entity from functional harmony, often favouring long, modal lines over an allegiance to the tonic and the dominant. However, listening to La Barbara and Monk’s work, particularly Monk’s 1971 album Key, has given me the desire to blend the use of extended technique and rich, multitracked, consonant harmony. I am someone who will virtually always choose to multitrack my vocal harmonies because I feel my tone of voice lends itself well to the textural quality of the technique. However, I set myself a challenge exercise to use only four vocal tracks altogether – two employing straight-ahead, consonant singing and two using extended vocal techniques. I sang a two part quartal harmony in my middle register, then complemented these with two higher lines using extended vocal technique. As I sang I massaged my Adam’s apple and slid between falsetto notes to try and capture the microtonal intervals. I stepped back from the four track blend and listened. I was immediately captured by the technique. I felt that if added many, many more layers to this I could use this blend of styles as the fervour portion of the suite.

I have developed the central theme of my sound work. I want to create a suite that is essentially an interpretation of the three primary uses of a parabolic microphone. These uses are nature/ornithological recording, espionage/eavesdropping and sports crowd recording. I want to use what I believe to be the pervasive themes of each as a basis and inspiration for a composition. I have assigned a word to each theme. Nature is placidity, espionage is intrusion, and sports crowds is fervour. Placidity, intrusion and fervour will be the thematic guideline for the piece. Nature and ornithological recording represents the calm and the tranquil, espionage represents encroachment and invasion, and sports crowds represent heady chaos. I will use the intrusion theme to build upon my concept of the sonics of encroachment, possibly recording very close proximity wildlife sounds to capture a private, almost carnal mood, sounds that could appear to some to be too personal and grotesque to ever be shared. I’m building upon Jez Riley-French’s technique of agrarian field recording and will incorporate some of his ideas into my praxis. All necessary field recordings will be done on a parabolic microphone to fulfil the spatialised element of the assignment. I have decided against spatialising my piece in octophonic because I feel my idea is conceptually rich enough as it is without needing to take it to such an elaborate medium. 

Field recordings are going to be central to my piece. My encroachment sonics concept means I will be looking to record in private spaces, unencumbered by the public, shared sonosphere. I want to be able to record guttural, bodily sounds that occur in little nooks and crannies of nature. I’m looking at using contact mics or hydrophones to delve into these kinds of spaces. I watched a talk by eminent field recordist Jez Riley-French, Audible Silence, where he details some of his work and the nature of contemporary listening as a practice. He presents a four-day recording of the inside of a beehive, and explains that his methodology for undertaking this work was to listen solely to this for the entire duration. He described the four-day experience as “empowering”, because he began to appreciate the naturally symphonic qualities of the beehive, and treated the sound as a natural composition in itself. This is a valuable tool for me going forward. When choosing sound sources to record, I don’t want to select things merely based on one particularly exciting or stimulating timbre, or one moment within the recording that sounds good. I want to choose sound sources that have a prolonged, sonically holistic quality. I will endeavour to understand my field recordings as compositions within themselves, not spoils of salvage anthropology to mindlessly manipulate and process. Riley-French notes that for years now, sound sources in music have been so compressed for palatability that the human ear has adapted to never hearing the full, rich, dynamic range of the sound. He argues that humans have almost developed an aural laziness, or are sonically out-of-shape. In this vein, I will carefully evaluate what processing to do on my sound sources. I want to compress sounds for certain aesthetic reasons, to achieve a fuller, warmer and fatter sound, but Riley-French has taught me to be careful not to remove huge and important parts of the naturally occurring dynamic range within sound sources.

Today I explored the possibilities of spatialising a sonic work. I know I want to work with my concept of the sonics of encroachment, and I’m debating how to flesh this out. The concept in inherently spatialised, because it deals with the notion of personal boundary and immediate area – sounds are significant solely because of the their relative position to the object of the recording. I wanted to explore a grander, more technical notion of spatialisation, so I set up an exercise of poesis on GRM Spaces. I brought eight wav. files – simple, basic home recordings of sung tones – and loaded them in to the DAW. I created an expansive, richly voiced G major chord with my voice, with eight different notes and various embellishments on each to differentiate and emphasise them. I automated a few routes with GRM Spaces. Some of the patterns seemed stimulating, and when I closed my eyes and focused on the sounds I found them to be very kinetic and dynamic. Other patterns I created seemed arbitrary. The slower moving ones seemed to slightly derail the compositional development of the piece. They sounded forced. I am really reflecting on whether I want to use GRM spaces going forward. I want to make sure that I’m not spatialising in octophonic merely because I have the technology at my disposal. I feel the equipment required to listen is scarce and inaccessible for the vast majority of people. As I continue to work I will evaluate the compositional merits of my piece and my field recordings to decide whether it aesthetically needs spatialisation. 

Attending A Thousand Words for Weather led me to the work of Tansy Spinks, whose thesis Associating Places: Strategies for Live, Site Specific, Sound Art Performance (2014) provides robust theoretical framework for site-specific work and location selection. She notes three aspects to consider when working with sound on site, the actual, the active and the associated. “The first aspect describes what is essentially inherent to the place, the second can be encouraged to be ‘sounded’ through physical intervention, and the third outlines and forms what I have coined as the wider material of the site”. My interaction with the studying student in the listening booth sits on the parallel between the actual and the activated. One could argue that a student working is of course inherent to Senate House Library, yet could also make the case for the student being a separate entity with agency and autonomy, and only became an active “sounded” participant when encroached upon. While they would be expected to occupy the space, the also do not share the same characteristics as the space. A Thousand Words for Weather feels like public art, in some ways, but manages to incorporate such specific and idiosyncratic spatial elements too. 

On page 92 of her thesis, Spinks deals with the initial assessment an artist must make of a site. She argues that, while a sound artist performing in the space cannot embody everything that has goes on before there, they can ensure that some “previous existence or current usage be appropriated and transmitted in performance”. This quote feels so pertinent and empowering to me. It simultaneously accepts the human limitations of our practice, but urges us as artists to respect and value the space, and never to dismiss the inherent artistic and creative capacities woven in to the space and the place. Through A Thousand Words for Weather and Tansy Spinks’ work, I feel I’ve been able to build upon my research into my “sonics of intrusion and privacy” enquiry, and have discovered the theory of space and site, both of which I will be transmitting into my practice going forward.  

I attended the A Thousand Words for Weather exhibition at Senate House Library to explore site-specific art and to develop my research into the sonics of intrusion and privacy. The exhibition, curated by Jessica J. Lee and Claudia Molitor, takes place throughout large rooms, hallways and small reading nooks, and features sound pieces and poets of various nationalities dealing with the theme of Weather, its sensory and emotional power and its capricious, ephemeral nature. The exhibition is staged in public spaces, and in order to participate you must listen in spaces designed not only for artist and subject, but for University of London students studying in their own private worlds. Many of the installations are inconspicuous, often simply a pair of headphones attached to a wall or small window booths fitted with low-volume, highly directional speakers to reduce bleed into communal spaces.

The design of the installations mean that many of these students are totally unaware of A Thousand Words for Weather’s existence, and can look, like passers-by did in my parabolic microphone field tests, confused or bemused by a sudden encroachment of their space. One listening booth was positioned a mere foot away from the back of someone’s chair, in a room empty of any other people. The sheer confusion as I took my place directly behind them sharply contrasted the thematic content of the poetry I started hearing through the headphones. My position behind this unwilling subject was concrete, rooted and imposing, locked and steady, a clear statement of intent, a gesture with substantial fecundity. The subject matter of the poetry deal with the fleeting, gentle and ephemeral nature of rain – how a brief, almost dainty episode of showers evokes wistfulness and melancholy. I suddenly understood the potential power of site-specific  work, and how leaving an essential self-contained piece of art to the mercy of a public space, full of external agents and non-participants, can allow one to probe for other meanings or for value beyond the immediate art itself. I previously imagined that site-specific art must be inextricably tied to some inherent characteristic about a place, liking the chiming of a cathedral bell or the birdsong in an orchard, but it can be so much more than that. Locational value can be found through the unexpected elements. 

David Novak argues in Sound Recordings (2018), “technologies quickly became embedded in the iconography of field collection that characterized early salvage anthropology. The presence of the recorder framed the dominant practices of ethnographic encounter, with the phonograph indexing a self-contained context of capture and analysis but not the more complex multidirectional aspects of exchanges with native informants”. Could my work in the field last week have been analogous with this critique? Am I imposing myself on others, and inadvertently drawing a parallel between my subjects and those of these indigenous tribes encountered by the ethnographers of the early twentieth century? Am I, by practicing an intrusive methodology, failing to treat these people with the respect and dignity they deserve? These questions are essential to me as I examine my positionality within the wider context and history of sound art. It is important for my work to constantly analyse and contextualise the implications of my practice.

Taking the parabolic microphone to an open public space, a playing field, I was presented with both urban and natural elements that could be woven into the same sonic texture and soundscape. The directionality of the microphone allowed me to both point the microphone skyward and create expansive soundscapes melding these elements, and also to focus in on one or two sound sources to create a more isolated cultural picture within the urban landscape. I remember turning the pre-gain up on the channel and letting the broad textures fill my ears. The sound of a glass bottle being kicked through grass, or rain lashing against a metal bin – the parabolic microphone really provided me with a strong sense of creative agency and an expanded sense of choice in terms of selecting sound sources. 

I performed field audio tests with a parabolic microphone. They generally have a lower fidelity sound than more conventional microphones but the angular resolution in the frontal plane is very high. This creates a highly directional, almost penetrative effect which allowed me to begin my exploration of the sonics of intrusion and privacy. A person’s footsteps could be heard with some clarity over twenty metres away, creating an almost disorientating multi-sensory tableau, wherein my perception of sound travel and distance was warped as the distance between the subject and their produced sound failed to align. I am yet to explore the notion of a field recordist’s sensory condition when working, but entering a space as a supposedly detached, objective viewer, and that having that status immediately infringed upon as a result of one’s own methods seems to be an extremely rich subject matter.  The idea of sonic intrusion sprang up after taking this in. Pointing a rather garish microphone at a passer-by and extracting such private and idiosyncratic sounds such as their footsteps belies the calm, methodical, and poised temperament that is commonly associated with field recording. Suddenly, as a field recordist I become responsible for the disruption of my immediate environment. Am I now responsible for some kind of cultural decline? Do the alarmed faces of these civilians, from whom I’ve pillaged their bodily rhythms and their conversations, prove that I have managed to weaponise field recording? This route of analysis evokes images of salvage anthropology. I will use this ethical, dialectical lens to constantly evaluate, re-evaluate and critique my practice and praxis.