Category 4
Outdoors, Live Soundscape, Pre-recorded Instrument
Perhaps the least common and most unusual category is one of taking a pre-recorded instrument outdoors, especially since it is in an unpredictable and exposed acoustic space and challenging to take amplification equipment into the elements. What would artists choose to send through those loudspeaker cones in nature or urban spaces? Why?
One of my colleagues, Iris van der Ende (b. 1990), has been developing a project outdoors in the Dutch countryside near Leiden. By tying speakers to the wings of historic windmills, and
“I imagine that four musicians stand in front of a windmill and that their sound is sent from the wings. The wind determines the consonance of the four parties. I imagine that the wind the conductor is.”1
pitch-bending of the long sustained pitches in the first study as they made their wide rotations. The entire setting – green polders and cloudy blue sky, the wind in the trees and birds singing and the sound of the blades swishing counter-clockwise was captivating. And the special opportunity to see and hear sound move at a scale not normally accessible to musicians. We have many digital methods to model the effects of the rotating speakers, but witnessing it live and physical has a different impact. (Few theatres are equipped for rotating speakers at such heights.) Besides live witnesses to the studies, van der Ende plans to create a DVD or website of the “Molen en Klank” studies, with added historical information on each windmill.
Cathy van Eck (b. 1979) works in the direction of performance art and sound walks. One particular example includes her slow walk Hearing Sirens (2005-2010) through cities carrying a backpack with a large pair of yellow sirens on her back, playing audio from mp3-players and exploring the space as passersby stop to listen. She uses the audio recording as an impulse to investigate public and often reverberant spaces such as tunnels, and draws attention to sounds usually ignored in daily life. Some other pieces of hers reduce the performance equipment even more, to simply a large cone as an ear trumpet to listen closely to sounds in the environment: how to make the ears more 'sensitive'. She then shares the cone with others as they become curious to listen in a fresh and engaged way. This recent project, called Extended Ears in Mülheim, Germany is detailed in the research paper of Jan Schachter, where she experimented with how to make sounds of the city ‘framed’ for music. She builds on concepts by composer Luigi Russolo The Art of Noise (1913):
He asks us to ‘amuse ourselves by orchestrating together in our imagination’ the sounds of the city. A compositional process should be the consequence of hearing the sounds of the city, with the result that one listens to city sounds as if they were music. It is this process that I investigate: How can ordinary everyday sounds of the city sound as if they were ‘orchestrated’, in other words, as if they are not only city sounds but also a piece of music?2
Van Eck writes about two major musical ways of treating city sounds: one being imitation, where the listener must know the sound's source to which the imitation refers because in fact the source of the sound is something else (an orchestra or violin, for instance), and the second being reproduction, electroacoustic compositions using sound reproduction technologies. Although, she adds that recordings could also be heard as imitations by loudspeaker membranes.
In both approaches [imitation and reproduction], therefore, the composer transforms a city soundscape so it becomes music for the audience. For them, the city soundscape itself is not the music; only after framing it with either recorded or instrumental sound is the audience able to hear the musicality the composer perceives in these soundscapes. The sounds are taken out of their environment and all visual references to what caused the soundscape are lost...[In Extended Ears] there is no explicit translation made from the soundscape toward a musical composition, as the composers mentioned earlier did, but due to the addition of these extensions the city sounds change. A conscious modification of a sound is often typical of music. By adding small modifications to the city soundscape, I try to ‘musicalise’ these sounds.3
These thoughts from an artist so connected to physically exploring the environmental sounds to which she listens (and encourages her audience to hear) are useful in thinking about soundscapes as music or 'musicalized', and at which point the soundscapes are music when directed by a composer through conscious modification of sound. Van Eck's work emphasizes the connection to sound source – contextual listening, and especially the venue of listening. For her performances, very public listening in a way, being outdoors is crucial. Other compositions performed in concert halls form a stark contrast to this type of work; one realizes that imitation and reproduction are necessary as soon as one is out of ear-shot of the original place of listening.
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1 Words from Iris van der Ende's in-progress research paper “Molen en Klank”, translated by Yvonne Freckmann. 2016.
