«The [rain] drop surrenders its form when it hits the ground, and that’s what we hear. If it falls in a puddle or a lake, it makes a little plop, actually the sound of another drop momentarily forming on the rebound. It falls on grass or leaves, it trickles and runs. If it falls on paved ground, it splatters. In steady, gentle rain it is possible to close one’s eyes and hear an entire landscape, its variable surface textures picket out in the pattern of the sound.» Tim Ingold, Correspondences (2021)
It is such an intimate relation to the spacial topography of the place, as created in Tim Ingold’s essay, through the sound of rain, which I had in mind when it came to (re-)composing, or reconfiguring, an (acoustic but not only) sense of the Grandes-Serres de Pantin (GSP) in IRCAM’s ambisonics studio 1. I wished to explore spatial intimacy through different layers, whose respective presence varies through time; a variation of sonic textures, extents, and encounters at different scales.
These layers are composed of :
(1) An EM32 ambisonic recording made at the GSP during actual rain, which falls on the hangar’s sheds and sneaks in through holes in the roof forming puddles inside. At some locations, it falls on leftovers of building equipment and metal debris et creates a tonal percussive sound. In the used recording, this appears as a well located salient sound integrated in the overall rhythmic rain texture. The raw recording is more than 30 minutes long. From this duration, I choose some sections i which the steady hangar landscape made audible by the rainy texture was momentarily inhabited by intruding momentary sound events, for example a car passing by outside the hangar or the squeaky door of the projection room opening discretely. Through a careful placement of only few of such almost inaudibly ‚different‘ sections, I aimed at creating a subliminal narrative skeleton which which guides the auditor through the place but leaves the scene to a sense of space.
(2) Two more EM32 ambisonic recording made at the GSP during actual rain, this time overlaid in situ with synthetic sounds created from a rainstick midi abstraction (brought in by myself) and projected into the hangar through the 6-channel speaker array. In the second one, to this textural overlay is complemented with single instrumental sounds (brought in by AKH) also projected on 6-channel speaker array, that act a bit like the narrative sound events inn (1). But this time, the narrative effect is less bound to actions which suggest human presence, but rather to gestural/dynamic similitude of these more abstract sounds to the sonic components already in place. The association of sounds happening actually in the place while recording with related but more synthetic sound textures and events simultaneously projected/diffused in the place chances the spatial exploration through an inherently sculptural musical component. This play also touches upon the possibility of a space, or landscape, to transform and reconfigure, without loosing its characteristic topography.
(3) Monophonic bruitages (sound effects) made by rolling metal tubes on the ground, using both the straight recording and its reversed double. These sounds convey to the sound of metal, incorporating the site’s industrial history, an intimately ‚personal‘ appearance, bearing the and located located in the space of the historic hangar. They are convoluted with three different HOA SRIR’s (spatial room impulse responses) which I recorded with the EAC team last year in this particular hangar at the GSP. I choose the SRIR’s recorded with measurement signal sources placed at three different locations, complementary to the corner location marked by the rain percussion described in (1). This layer thus essentially contribute to the acoustic mapping of the space.
(4) Stereophonic close-up recordings of the rain dripping through the holes in the roof in a puddle and on metal debris inside, made with the Tellinga parabole microphone. These recordings are multiplied and arranged in circles directly routed on the speakers of two levels of the ambisonic dome: the added floor level, and the second level (at about 45° elevation to the horizontal) of the standard ambisonic hemisphere. Through this direct routing, the intimate materiality of the raindrops is brought close to the listener, inside the studio, rather than referring somewhere else. This layer explores the perception/feeling of presence (in) here and (out) there, both conveyed to sound, or, the twofold spatial existence of a place when restituted in the studio.