Deep Mapping and Sonic Stories:

The Making of ECOTONE 

Niamh O Brien

Deep mapping is an approach to representing place, which is not only concerned with the physical or tangible, but encompasses all that a place contains: histories, conversations, imaginations, feelings, memories, flora, and fauna; the man-made, accidental, and subaltern (Bodenhamer and others 2015; Roberts 2016; Biggs and Modeen 2020). The roots of the approach are most often located in literary cartography and the work of William Least Heat-Moon who published his exploration of Chase County, Kansas, in the form of PrairyErth: (a deep map) in 1991. But deep mapping has since extended beyond the literary genre to performance and the visual arts. The approach includes spatial considerations and adheres to locations and boundaries, but what is added is a reflexive narrativity that includes the complexity of human stories, identities, and perspectives. The practice has the capacity to bring together histories, mythologies, facts, and fictions, and weave them together in polyvocal expression of a place.

I am a composer, musician, radio producer, and sound artist, and my recent research involved developing a sonic deep mapping approach. I recorded the music, sounds, and stories of a place, and re-imagined them through my composition and performance practice. My research involved the creation of a sound installation called ECOTONE: A Sonic Journey Through Kildimo-Pallaskenry. The parish of Kildimo-Pallaskenry is my home-place and sits on the banks of the Shannon Estuary, twenty kilometres from Limerick City in the South-West of Ireland. Over two days in September 2021 I invited people to come to Ringmoylan Pier, the entry point in Kildimo-Pallaskenry to the Shannon Estuary. From the pier I broadcast an eighty-minute-long soundscape on a loop. The soundscape incorporated audio interviews I had conducted with local people, field recordings from the local environment, and my own original music and song. I broadcast the piece using a short-range FM transmitter. People listened at Ringmoylan via radios placed around the pier, or on their own transistors and car radios.

Gathering Sound 

I began gathering field recordings in Kildimo-Pallaskenry in February 2021, with a focus on Ringmoylan Pier. I brought my microphone and hydrophones (underwater microphones) to Ringmoylan for morning and evening sessions to record birdlife and water sounds, and the hustle and bustle of cars, walkers, and swimmers. I recorded at high tide and low tide, and from various vantage points, some closer to the pier and the slipway, others further along the shore. Inland, I gathered the sound of birds singing in my back garden, the atmosphere of chat and laughter outside my local pub, and the soundscape of local sporting games. Sometimes, I went on specific field recording trips to Ringmoylan or local events, not knowing what I would gather but always with the intention of actively recording for an allotted amount of time. I engaged in what Barry Truax describes as ‘listening-in-search’ (2002: 22), which means I was searching the environment for cues. These cues included sounds that I had not paid attention to before, or sounds I felt were important to capture for my compositions. I recorded the sound of waves at Ringmoylan Pier, the sound of the Maigue River, a local tributary of the estuary, cars passing through Kildimo village, supporters shouting at local GAA games, and birdsong. All of these sounds felt representative of this place and were key aspects of its sonic environment. At other times, the process of gathering the sounds of Kildimo-Pallaskenry was guided by what was happening in the editing and arranging of the work. For example, if a sequence needed more active sound, such as people singing in my local pub or playing in the local school yard, I went with intention and gathered that in the field.

Ringmoylan pier

April 2021

About five hundred metres from the pier, around the corner, on the rocky, seaweed-strewn shore, I sit with my microphone. The tide is out and the air is completely still. It feels like I’ve stuck my fingers in my ears. Even on windy days at high tide the sound of the water can be difficult to catch. The main flow of the estuary is a kind of white noise motorway in the distance, not audible from the pier. Closer to the shore there are some pockets where the water might babble and ripples roll in. Sometimes the seaweed pops and crackles. Depending on the tide, the place can be busy with birds. Often, I find myself desperately seeking the sound of the water rather than listening closely to what is here. This is not the sea, it is an estuary. Its sounds are elusive and industrial, not romantic or loud. It requires a deeper kind of listening. So, today, I listen closely, and I hear the mud. I hear it dripping and shimmering. The sound of the moon, pulling her waters towards her.

Pauline Oliveros’s ‘deep listening’ practice informed how I listened to Kildimo-Pallaskenry. The technique requires active engagement of the ear so that rather than passively hearing sounds, we are actively listening to them. The ear is constantly taking in sonic information but much of this is tuned out by the brain. Deep listening is intended to expand our perception of sound, focusing on the detail and complexity of what is happening around us (Oliveros 2005). Oliveros’s practices and exercises often focus on listening to the soundscape around us, both natural and man-made. The idea of deep listening, which ties in nicely with deep mapping, inspired me to pay close attention to the sound of my environment. At Ringmoylan Pier I listened for the birds and the river, but I also tried to listen deeper and that is when I heard the sound of dripping from the muddy estuary banks. When sitting in the local pub I paid attention to all the conversations around me, each individual voice, how it sounded and interacted with others, rather than just hearing all the voices as one homogenous sound. Through the field recording process I was re-listening to my surroundings, paying new attention to sounds which stirred up memories and feelings of connection and belonging, but also tuning my ears to sounds which I otherwise would have ignored.

In his ‘partial view’ of deep mapping, Iain Biggs notes that written iterations of deep mapping are sometimes referred to as ‘vertical travel writing’ (2014). Forsdick, Kinsley, and Walchester state that one of the principal factors distinguishing vertical travel writing from other forms of travel writing is a sense of confinement or restriction, either in terms of the scope or speed of the travel (Forsdick and others 2021: 106). My sonic explorations were confined, in a geographical sense, to Kildimo-Pallaskenry. I adhered to the parish boundaries and recorded only local places and local voices. I was also confined in terms of technique and my working exclusively with sound. As I listened intently with headphones on, often closing my eyes and blocking out everything but the sound coming through my microphone, I held the image of a deep map constantly in my mind. I imagined that one layer of my deep map would consist solely of these environmental recordings, these various ‘sounds of place’. Forsdick et al. go on to say that affected by this ‘boundedness’, these vertical travel writers adopt certain methods. These include slow travel, stillness, and paying close attention to what is often over-looked (2021). Focusing in on field recording and the sounds of this place altered my movement through the parish. I spent longer periods of time in stillness at the water’s edge or sitting in the village with the car window open capturing the sounds of passing cars. The desire to record and re-present the sonic character of Kildimo-Pallaskenry required me to stop, to not speak, to just listen to the sounds of place. The method of deep mapping, while boundless in what it encompasses, allowed me to imagine various concentrated layers which were bounded and focused. 

Gathering Story 

The first work of literary cartography to call itself a deep map was William Least Heat-Moon’s PrairyErth: (a deep map) (1991). Heat-Moon spent nine years exploring Chase County in Kansas, describing it in minute detail. Historical and geographical information, interviews with locals, archival records, weather reports, folklore, gossip, and poetic reflection are all woven together in his book. Artist-scholars Pearson and Shanks went on to adapt and reinterpret the term ‘deep mapping’ as a methodological and philosophical approach to archaeology and performance (2001). In their approach to practice-based performance ethnography, they engage with thick description and mixed media to illustrate the past and explore the ties between people and place. Pearson and Shanks connect this approach to eighteenth century antiquarian descriptions of place, which include history, folklore, natural history, and hearsay. My approach to thick description was to include a diverse range of stories of place including history, folklore, and mythology. Most of the stories featured, however, came from interviews I conducted with Kildimo-Pallaskenry residents. 

Between May and September 2021, I conducted seventeen interviews with people living in the parish of Kildimo-Pallaskenry. Some of the interviews happened spontaneously, while others were pre-planned. The spontaneous interviews were conducted at Ringmoylan Pier where I approached walkers or swimmers and engaged them in a conversation about the project. The pre-planned interviews took place in the homes of the interviewees. All of the interviews were unstructured and informal. After I explained what the project was about, I asked the interviewees about memories of place, aspects of daily life and their thoughts on the future of Kildimo-Pallaskenry. Talk often turned to the global pandemic, local news, and my own connections in the parish. With every interview, my aim was to ‘go deep’ with the person I was in conversation with, to move away from small talk and towards their feelings towards the parish, their personal connections to the landscape and pictures of the past.

Ringmoylan Pier

June 2021

It is a grey afternoon at Ringmoylan. I have given myself the task of talking to people today, and so instead of rushing away from the pier towards the mudflats and rocky inlets that stretch along the bank, I have stayed closer to the pier and the car.  I take out my giant microphone and start to record the sound of the waves lapping against the pier.

After a short time, a small car pulls up. I have a good feeling immediately, as the car pulls all the way up the pier and stops kind of haphazardly; these people are familiar with this place, they are not shyly hiding the car away and locking it. I am standing by the gate with my microphone and the window of the car comes down almost immediately: “What’s this now?” I tell the lady what I’m doing and ask her for an interview. Laughter ensues as she hunts her husband and dog from the scene and says, “I’m not even dressed!” The feeling is right for an interview, and so is the person. She has a long-standing connection with the pier as she grew up in the neighbouring townland of Ballymartin. We talk about how the pier was before, how busy it used to be, the shop that was there, and the pool. Soon enough the questions are turned on me, as they always are. “Who are you now, are you local?... ah go away, Tony’s daughter…Gerry, guess who this is, Tony O’ Brien’s daughter”. Her husband, Gerry joins in and they chat about the ‘courting’ that used to go on at Ringmoylan.

While we chat, I think about possible lines of conversation, egging them towards the more personal or philosophical connections. There is warmth in their talk, even for the darker shades of this place. They tell me about the tragedies that have happened here and acknowledge the loneliness and isolation of some locals who come to the pier in search of conversation and connection. We wrap up our conversation. “Isn’t that great you’re doing this now. That man who pulled up behind us there, he would have stories for you about this place…” It’s the local funeral director.

In May and June 2021, I visited the two local primary schools, Kildimo National School and Pallaskenry National School, in order to gather some of the younger voices of the parish. I made two visits to the schools and worked with students in Fifth Class, boys and girls aged 11–12. I gave them an interview worksheet to complete for my next visit which included questions about what they like about their local area and what they would change about it. It also tasked them with gathering reflections on place from someone in their household and included an invitation to them to imagine Kildimo-Pallaskenry fifty years in the past and fifty years in the future. One unexpected addition to the voices I gathered was a selection of archive materials that were shared with me by some of the interviewees. Carmel O’Grady brought me some cassette tapes that were recorded in her family’s pub in Kildimo, The Seven Sisters, in the 1960s and local historians provided me with oral histories they had recorded locally. These second-hand materials allowed for the voices of some deceased members of the community to be featured in ECOTONE and added a richness to the ‘past maps’ of Kildimo-Pallaskenry, which were part of the work.

Another story which I included in the ECOTONE soundscape was the mythological story of the Irish goddess Sionna (otherwise known as Shannon, Sínann, Sionann, Sinead). In the legend, Sionna is warned not to approach a well in which wisdom was hidden. She voyages to the well anyway and the water rises up and breaks free in a flood, drowning Sionna and carrying her to the sea. ‘Thereafter the river could never return to the limiting confines of the well and instead watered the land’ (Monaghan 2008: 420). I included this story as it provided another perspective on the landscape. Mythology offers us an alternative history and imagining of place, a fresh perspective that reaches into the past. Deep mapping practices led me to draw upon a diversity of sources about place such as folklore, mythology, and music. All were considered of equal importance in this holistic approach to representing Kildimo-Pallaskenry. 

While Pauline Oliveros’s practice of deep listening guided my field recordings, political geographer Natalie Koch’s definition of deep listening informed how I approached my interviews. Koch uses the term to describe a mindset and ethic of critical reflexivity and intellectual humility in fieldwork and interviews. She argues that in ‘speaking’ for others, researchers need to reflect on how they ‘listen’ in fieldwork (Koch 2020). Deep listening engages an openness and empathy and encourages us to deliberately seek out contrasting opinions to our own. Deep listening takes place in a broad variety of listening ‘encounters’ that blur the boundaries between fieldwork and everyday listening practices (Koch 2020: 60). 

Listening in multiple ways, across multiple spatialities, temporalities, and communities may be one modest way to conceptualize the researcher’s everpresent challenge of working against the masculinist and imperialist impulses of extractivist research, and toward the realm of mutual understanding and surprise. (Koch 2020: 58)

Koch proposes that humility, and a setting aside of our positions as ‘experts’, connects deep listening with feminist geographic approaches that have existed since the early 1990s. These methods encourage researchers to search for sources and new ideas beyond the academy, to acknowledge mistakes, change minds and be proven wrong. This approach to recording local voices echoes with the plurivocal nature of deep mapping. Selina Springett (2015) and Harriet Hawkins (2015) write about how deep mapping can be a democratic form of cartography that includes multiple voices and interpretations of place. ECOTONE enacted this idea by presenting place as an assemblage or accumulation of stories. I sought out and featured voices from a range of age-groups and equal numbers of men and women. There was no one authoritative voice, instead deep mapping calls for a presentation of multiple experiences, backgrounds, and perspectives, woven together to emphasise connections and contrasts; some voices converging and echoing one another while others reveal diverse trajectories. 

Home studio

July 2021

After a couple of days interviewing and editing, days with my head buried in words, listening to them, cutting them up, putting them back together, listening again and again, picking up the harp or sitting at the piano is welcome respite. I noodle around with some notes on the piano. Searching for sounds that interest me, but without much intention. I play around with G mix, G minor, F major, and G major. And something about that feels right. This circle of changing tonalities. I find a sparse melody for the first part. The opening notes feel like some kind of Scandinavian herding call! I can imagine someone singing it across the estuary. The second part centres around the F major and G major chords. Back and forth, up and down, the dip of the F chord and the rise of the G chord, like waves. I keep at the melody sequence for about 10 minutes and I have it. Then I put it in the picture of the whole piece. Is there an interview or voice I feel like it corresponds with? What about some writing I’ve come across? I remember the Maigue song I found. Ah yes, those final lines “Flow on to the Shannon, flow on lovely Maigue.” That works with the second part melody. I make some slight changes to fit the melody with the words, and I change the key to suit my voice. And while I play, I am transported back to a couple of weeks before, when I took a trip down the Maigue in a kayak with some neighbours. This river I had driven over thousands of times, barely glanced at it, and now I can see it clearly. Its banks are lush and teeming with wildlife. Swans take off and land near-by. Cows watch us as we paddle past. And I know then that this is the right song and the right melody for this part of the parish.

Composing

In his manifesto for deep mapping, the artist Clifford McLucas proposed ten central tenants. Included among them are the following:

Deep maps will be BIG — the issue of resolution and detail is addressed by size. 

Deep maps will be SLOW — they will naturally move at a speed of landform or weather. 

Deep maps will be SUMPTUOUS — they will embrace a range of different media or registers in a sophisticated and multilayered orchestration

[…]Deep maps will require the engagement of both the insider and outsider

[…]Deep maps will bring together the amateur and the professional, the artist and the scientist, the official and the unofficial, the national and the local

[…]Deep maps will be unstable, fragile and temporary. They will be a conversation and not a statement. (cited in Springett 2015: 626)

These tenets highlight the active nature of deep mapping. McLucas states that it is performative and democratic, and it challenges the idea that knowledge resides solely in the domain of the experts. It can open lines of communication between the national and the local, between insider and outsider, in a way that is artistic and impactful. Deep maps do not strive for the objectivity and authority of cartography: instead, they open themselves up for debate and contestation, and support an ongoing conversation and exchange on the topic of place. In this way deep mapping is ‘personal and partisan’ (McLucas n.d.). Throughout the composition, editing and arrangement stages of the ECOTONE project I was both the listener and editor, the observer and creator. What was presented in ECOTONE was my version of Kildimo-Pallaskenry. It was a sonic journey through place shaped by my experience and interaction with it. Place became transformed through the composition process as I edited and arranged the sounds and stories, and introduced my own original music to the artwork.

The composition process involved both the generation of original melodies, and the adaptation of existing songs and poems. I composed while in the studio, moving back and forth between editing and arranging field recordings and interviews, and creating music on the harp, my primary instrument. When setting existing lyrics to music, my aim was to mirror the tonality and metre of the words. It was an organic and intuitive process based on trial and error and continuous redrafting. Sometimes I combined the lyrics with a chord pattern and gradually constructed a melody to fit them together, and other times I slowly worked the lyrics into a melody and experimented with different chord patterns underneath. As described in the journal entry below, it sometimes happened that the melody emerged first, and I then began the process of editing it to fit with the words of the song. The instrumental pieces in ECOTONE emerged from one of two processes. The first was functional. I required music to fulfil particular functions, informed by what I was editing and arranging at the time. For example, following an interview, I may have needed some minimal chords on the harp to create a moment of pause and reflection. At other points, I needed the music to contrast these more reflective moments and increase the tempo of the work. For this I composed two tunes in an Irish traditional style, ‘Swimming in the In-Between’ and ‘Sionna’s Jig’. Some other instrumental melodies came about spontaneously. While improvising or warming-up on the harp, notes and melodic phrases would emerge with a tonality or atmosphere, that seemed to echo the feeling of an interview, song, or field recording already in the piece.

I had a specific intention in mind when I composed ‘Moon Pull’, for example. There was a point in ECOTONE where I layered two interviews that mention Ringmoylan and a piano floating down-river. I wanted a piano melody which would help to illustrate the story and bring the listeners to a more imaginative space and move them from hearing about the piano in a story, to actually hearing it and seeing it in their mind’s eye. I began with the first four note phrase (A C F E) and enjoyed how this melodic fragment sounded like it was floating somewhere between F major 7 and A minor. I came back to these opening notes twice more in this short melody to sustain this effect and affect. The 3/4 bar at the end of the phrase creates a feeling of being constantly pulled back to the start to repeat the phrase over and over again. This feeling is also promoted by the tied note across the bar line between bars 1 and 2 and the syncopation in the middle of bars 1 and 3. This repetition, combined with the mixed tonality, creates a meditative effect and echoes the constant pull of the tides on the estuary banks.

The instrumental music I composed as part of this research was heavily influenced by Irish traditional music. The structure and form of the pieces reflect traditional dance tunes and slow airs, while the tonalities and timbres were inspired by the landscape and people of Kildimo-Pallaskenry. The use of traditional-style compositions reflects my own background as a professional Irish traditional harp player but also echoes the strong historical and geographical ties that traditional music has to place and region. The genre features regional styles of playing; repertoires associated with particular areas of the country. Some also propose more mythological and folkloric connections between the music and the landscape. The traditional flute player Seamus Tansey stated that traditional music came from the land itself, that it arose from

the laws of nature and the law of the land [….] The wind, the rain, the flowing river that shapes the mind and passions of our ancient forefathers inspiring them to harness all together the sounds of animals, minerals, birds and insects so as it moulded itself into a melody of Ireland’s soul. (Tansey cited in Smith 1998: 132) 

Smith’s article explores ideas of landscape, lineage, memory, and regional style as markers of authenticity in Irish traditional music. In my research I was not concerned with regional style or any ‘authentic’ expression of traditional music, but traditional music is part of my musical language and its strong historical and symbolic ties to the landscape mean that its performance is an expression of place in my work. Smith references Simon Schama’s research on landscape and memory and the idea that landscape, as opposed to geography, involves the agency of humans who appreciate and interpret the landscape: ‘Art, therefore, becomes an expression of the interaction of the human population and the geography it occupies; it is an extension of the landscape itself’ (Smith 1998: 133). The music I created for ECOTONE was an extension of the landscape, an expression of the interaction between me and my surroundings.

Along with traditional music, soundscape composition was a key aspect of the compositional process for ECOTONE. Soundscape composition is a genre that utilises field recordings in creative work. It is a type of electroacoustic music that brings environmental sounds into conversation with the aesthetics of pacing, shaping, and pitch relationships (Levack Drever 2002: 22). These works are located between real and processed sounds, between reality and imagination, as composers place unprocessed (real) sounds from the environment in conversation with processed (abstract) sounds which they have edited. Despite their strong roots in the real world, soundscape compositions exist somewhere between the real and the mediated. Through manipulation, processing, and editing of field recordings they become representative of a new or re-imagined place: 

Sound recordings can now be organised, juxtaposed, mixed and altered in all sorts of ways. With these possibilities an entirely new place can be created from the sound materials of a certain location. We, the composers, can choose to side-step reality, highlight it, can create a caricature, make it poetic, sharper, softer, harsher. (Westerkamp 1999: 55)

Home studio 

August 2021

It is impossibly warm in Limerick! Up in the attic room, the only time I can work is at night. At 11pm, I swivel my chair repeatedly from facing the laptop where ECOTONE is open, and the wall behind me, which is covered in post-it notes. Each note represents a piece of audio: some are interviews, others are songs or archive recordings. I move them around in different sequences and then stare at them, imagining how they would sound in that order. It feels like I’m ‘choreographing’ the sounds.

“Ok, so Indu enters stage left, as the music and field recordings fade… do we need script to introduce her? Her piece finishes up by bringing us back to Ringmoylan again, sounds of waves fade up slowly as Indu leaves the stage… a change of tone then, should the kids come in next? Maybe I will need them for balance later…” Every night I grapple with this arranging of what I have gathered and made, this weaving together of the various strands of place, moving through the many maps. I am enjoying the effect of layering many voices on top of each other and letting their colours seep into each other, blurring the boundaries between places and people, river and shore. These are counteracted by the breaths in the piece, the moments when my ear is pulled to just one voice. This is when people get to tell their stories, when they are extracted from the cacophony of a community of talk and given their moment in the light.

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay examines the ways in which soundscape composers redefine place through their artworks. He describes how collections of field recordings, or ‘sonic menageries’, are manipulated by soundscape composers to focus attention on and change our perceptions of place (2012: 226). Chattopadhyay notes that although soundscape compositions retain recognisability of the sounds’ sources even after they have been transformed by the composer, field recordings are ‘freed’ from their original location once they become part of a sonic artwork. Once recordings are made, they become part of a dislocated sonic menagerie and are then electroacoustically treated in composition. The artwork ‘creates a parallel listening experience to the original time and place — one of different temporality, spatiality and perspective, with a different ecosystem of sound altogether’ (228). Sounds from a location become part of a new sound-landscape: that of the composition. They become part of the world as represented by the composer. Through this conversation, soundscape compositions explore the relationship between composer and place, and can provoke discussion and realisations with regard to particular places (Westerkamp 1999: 52). In the case of ECOTONE, I edited field recordings and layered them with the music and interviews to draw the listeners’ attention the natural soundscape. Soundscape composer Katharine Norman says that soundscape compositions endeavour to re-connect us to our environment but can also introduce us to ‘a changed, perhaps expanded, appreciation of reality’ (1996: 19). In using ‘real-word’ sounds in composition my aim was to bring listeners’ attention to the natural soundscape but also to alter these sounds and merge them with instrumental music to create something imaginative and invite more emotional responses to the sonic environment. 

Editing 

Editing was the process of altering and manipulating the audio I recorded. I transferred interviews and field recordings from my recorder to Logic Pro software and edited their length and volume. Editing the voices was a process of extracting what I heard as the strongest moments from each interview. I define these as the times during the interview when I, as the listener, was particularly enthralled or interested in what the interviewee was talking about. These included moments of clarity, honesty, humour, warmth, or surprising aspects of people and place which were revealed through our conversation. During the edit, I sometimes distilled the whole interview by shaving back ‘small talk’ and conversational tangents. At other times I focused in on one particular point or story. I tried to find the essence of the person, and the clearest, most direct way of telling their story. After I made the decision to use FM radios for playback, some of them located outdoors on the pier, I knew that the voices had to be clearly audible, and the flow of the interview easily followed. I wanted to include as many voices as possible, while also maintaining the attention of the listener, so each interview was edited to approximately five minutes in duration.

Home Studio

August 2021

Editing is the place where I am most acutely aware of the personal version of place I am presenting. I chop down interviews and prune people’s words until they feel ‘right’ or ‘finished’, like a story with a beginning a middle and an end. I am especially torn about one particular interview. The interviewee is a colourful character and in our chat he named someone in an unflattering light, not out of any malice, rather, those were the facts of the story and a sign of the times. I remove these elements of the interview and reason that they are not essential, they don’t add anything to the story really, and why risk someone being offended. But at the back of my mind, I am conscious of the editing of place and people I am undertaking.

The need for order and easy listening often overrules any risks I might take. I am constantly being pulled towards clear signposts and simplicity, rather than pulling the interview apart, abstracting it, processing it and making people’s words some way unrecognisable. On the one hand this keeps the piece accessible, as listeners can easily connect people, voices and stories, and that’s important; on the other, it feels like a missed opportunity for experimentation and adventure. I am caught between these two approaches: one shaped by my experience in radio production, the other led by my ideas as a composer. Maybe I need to focus more on bringing these two approaches together, rather than imaging I am caught between them.

When editing the field recordings, I focused on filtering the audio with equalisation (EQ) [1]  and adding small amounts of reverb, [2] as well as altering the length and volume of the audio clips. Most of the time these changes and effects were used to highlight some element of the sound which I found interesting or beautiful. For example, in many of the recordings from Ringmoylan I amplified the sound of the gentle ripple of the water and muted the low hum which could be heard from Shannon International Airport across the river. I followed the approach of the soundscape composer and field recordist Hildegard Westerkamp who writes: 

I feel that the processing is only there to emphasize things that are already there and exaggerate it a bit. And, because I’m delighted by what’s there and I hear it in a certain way, I just want others to hear it in the same way! (cited in Norman 2004: 85)

Similarly, the design of the installation influenced how the field recordings were edited. The quiet and subtle recordings of distant waves and birds and the gentle hiss of the estuary mud would have been lost over the FM transmission, and so I favoured using more dynamic field recordings, such as the estuary on a particularly windy afternoon and the calls of supporters at a local sporting game.

The songs and instrumental pieces I composed were recorded directly into Logic Pro and were edited in a variety of ways for different purposes. In some sections the music was edited in a ‘conventional’ sense to balance instruments and create a cohesive musical sound. In other sections, I took a more experimental approach: melodies were broken up, patched back together, slowed down, and sometimes reversed, to create a certain atmosphere. I also made use of convolution reverb when editing the music in ECOTONE. Convolution reverb takes a sample from a real-world space (called an impulse response) and uses this to digitally recreate the reverberation of that space. You can then play any sound ‘through’ that convolution reverb. For example, I had impulse responses from my hydrophones under the estuary water. I could then play a melody on the harp ‘through’ this impulse response to hear the harp in that space. Convolution reverb allowed me to capture the acoustic of a location and imbue the recordings I created in the studio with a sense of that place. I used it to experiment with different tones and textures, and to create connections between spaces, melodies, and sounds throughout ECOTONE.

The process of sonically representing Kildimo-Pallaskenry was one of transformation, not unlike how place is transformed through cartography or visual art. In Edward Casey’s examination of Western landscape painting, he describes this transformative process as a ‘subliming’ of place, the internalisation of place in the mind of the artist (through imagination and reason, memory, evaluation, and appreciation), and the ‘reexteriorization’ of that place in a work of art (2002: 90). Landscape paintings, he says, convey the ‘sensuous’ experience of place, its essence and quality. The transition of an image from the external world to an artwork signals a move from ‘topography to topopoetry’ (Casey 2002: 90). Artists use their work to provide insight into the feeling of being in a place. When the artist who is ‘internalising’ this place is a composer of music, the world is transformed or re-sonified in a variety of ways. In my case, this involved the creative editing and arranging of materials, as well as the composition of original music.

Ringmoylan Pier

19 Sept 2021

The transmitter is working… most of the time. There is a level of unpredictability with it from radio to radio, the older transistors working better than the new car radios. Some frequencies also work better than others, and the position of the transmitter on the pier has an impact. I have help for my test run today, my mother, and my friend Fiona. Fiona is a composer who moved to K-P some years ago. She loves the ECOTONE idea and gives encouragement and feedback, helping me settle on a frequency as we compare sounds and radios. Mam takes her pocket radio on a walk, checking how far she can move from the pier and still pick up what’s happening. Fiona and I jump in and out of cars, place radios around the pier, and test sounds from all angles.

During the test run, a local man, Eamon Enright, comes to the pier for a walk. He hangs around the pier, peering at us and the radios before coming over to find out what’s happening. After I tell him what it’s all about, he leans against the car, head tilted to the radio, gaze set across the estuary, and listens for about 40 minutes. It’s great to watch Eamon listen, he almost talks to the radio, answering back to what people say “oh that’s right yeah… that’s right I remember that”. He asks “who is that now” enough times for me to realise that I need to add narrations to let people know who is talking. He gets us to tune in his radio and have it ready for when he visits at the weekend. The sound from his car radio is really awful! I am mortified… and he says “that’s perfect now thanks very much I can hear it no bother”. Fiona reminds me that people hear what they want to hear. The stories and the people were far more important to Eamon than the sound quality.

Arranging

Arrangement was how I described the process of positioning or sequencing the sonic elements of ECOTONE: the voices, field recordings, music, and song. The final version of the ECOTONE soundscape contained sixteen edited interviews, four songs and eleven passages where I wove together field recordings, layered voices, narration, vox pops from schoolchildren, and music. In many ways, this process of weaving together the various sonic elements was at the heart of creating ECOTONE. It was in the choreographing and layering of voices, music, and sounds that I attempted to bring to life the idea of deep mapping: the many conversations that are happening in a place simultaneously, the many sounds, and the many maps. 

At some points throughout ECOTONE I arranged the materials in order to create connections between different local voices. For example local historian Derek Cahill told me about a historical record from 1841 in which a piano was brought down the estuary on a barge. I layered this with some vox pops from local school children who said they once saw a ‘soggy piano’ floating by Ringmoylan Pier. Added to this layering was my playing of ‘Moon Pull’ on the piano. These three different sonic stories about place were brought together. The effect was to both bring a story to life in the listeners’ imagination but also to blur the lines between space and time, between reality and imagination. Applying a deep mapping approach allowed me to construct a soundscape that brought listeners on a journey flowing through and crossing over multiple spatial and temporal zones.

Installation Design 

Central to my installation design was my ambition that ECOTONE would be a shared listening experience where people would hear the same thing at the same time — as opposed to a self-directed listening experience where listeners could select pieces to listen to. I also wanted listeners to share a physical listening space. Due to Covid-19, many arts and community events were happening online at the time, and I found myself ‘scrolling’ past them every day on social media without engaging. I believe there was hunger at this time for ‘real’ events that physically brought people together. Finally, I wanted the event to be accessible for the older generation who were maybe not au fait with streaming technology. It was easier for me, and for them, to contact them and give them a place and time during which they could experience ECOTONE.

The pre-recorded and pre-edited soundscape I created for ECOTONE was played on my laptop, through the transmitter, and broadcast ‘out’ on the selected frequency during the event. People listened on their car radios, or personal transistors, by tuning in to the selected frequency, 105 FM. People could also listen to the soundscape on the radios I placed along the pier, which I had tuned to that frequency. I made many visits to the pier in the week leading up to the installation to try out ‘mini-broadcasts’. I experimented with broadcasting on different frequencies, and with the positioning of the transmitter and the radios at the pier. I placed the radios along the high wall of the pier, on the two picnic tables onsite and on rocks near the slipway. I walked through the space with the radios playing and imagined where listers might sit and listen. I observed that, due to the moderate volume of the radios, listeners would have to ‘gather round’ to hear ECOTONE. I positioned the radios in spaces where this could happen, where people could sit and stand together.

The Event

ECOTONE was presented at Ringmoylan Pier on 18 and 19 September 2021, between 11.30am and 6pm. These times were roughly aligned with the tides on those days, beginning at low tide and finishing at high tide, and this impacted on the flow of attendance and activity throughout the day. Mornings started quietly with few listeners, and more birds feeding in the mud than waves washing up on the shore. In contrast, in the final hour of the installation, there was a heightened atmosphere of hustle and bustle as local people arrived for an evening swim. My broadcasting station at the pier consisted of a gazebo cover, a table and chairs, provisions for tea and coffee, my laptop and FM transmitter, a car battery and inverter, a collection of radios, and a visitors’ book. I circulated a poster on social media and placed printed posters in local pubs and shops in the lead up to the event. I also printed leaflets to hand out to attendees, on which I listed the names of the interviewees in the order in which they would be heard and provided instructions on how to tune in and hear the piece. The visual elements of the installation included the welcome tent and the radios I placed around the space. Radios were positioned at the welcome desk, along the high wall of the pier and at the gate leading to the rocky path along the shore. 

In terms of the sonic space created by the installation sound came from the radios I placed on the pier and was also audible via the multiple car radios that were tuned in to 105 FM. Although the sound was coming from multiple sources, the overall sonic impact of the piece was low. There was a bed of radio sound from the cars and the pier radios, which was enough for someone to pick up that there was something different happening at the pier; enough to intrigue but not enough to overpower the sounds of birdsong, waves, and people in conversation. I often placed the radios near benches so that people might sit and listen together but the sonic and visual elements of the installation were in constant flux. When it rained, the radios were brought in and the sound became centred under the tent and in the car radios. At other times, there was no one listening in their cars and all the sound was coming from the pier radios. My neighbour also lent me a solar powered radio that burst into life once there was enough sun reaching through the clouds. The sonic landscape of ECOTONE changed constantly throughout the two days, complementing the hourly changes in the landscape of the estuary in response to movements of tide, sun, cloud, and wind.

Ringmoylan

Sept 2021

I sit at the desk feeling content and exhausted. Between showers of rain, and rushes of people, chatting and making tea, I find a moment or two when I can sit and watch and listen. Every radio is a different scene. Some are surrounded by people: listeners tilt their heads to hear better, or chat and add their voices to the score. Some radios are playing secretly, through headphones and in cars. Others play out to no one, serenading the land and the sea.

People over a certain age have a lot to say about Ringmoylan and what it used to be: my aunt tells me about when her family used to be dropped down there for the whole day to entertain themselves; my dad and neighbours talk about the man who was strong enough to swim out to the old lighthouse, and the pool - they all talk about when the pool was here. The younger people, who have less of a connection to this place, are here to listen and to learn. I listen to one radio up close, and hear another echo out at the end of the pier, and think about the new (old) picture I now have of this place, a place I barely knew six months ago.

Richard McKeogh is one unexpected arrival. He is a local sportsman, not known for any particular affiliation to the arts! He stays for an hour to hear Vincent Kennedy’s interview. He is learning something, he tells me through the car window. His dog starts to play with Maurice the photographer’s dog. I think to myself what a strange combination of people I seem to have gathered: academics and artists, and locals of all persuasions. My neighbour, Joanna, arrives with a gift for me: a gramophone that has been sitting in the local pub, unused for years. She said she thought I would appreciate it. This kind of local investment in the project, and, in me, is something that always catches me by surprise. And adds another layer of meaning to the whole thing.

The ECOTONE event mirrored elements of my deep mapping process. First, in the slower style of listening it supported. Echoing the altered pace I kept while gathering sound and story, the slower, more focused, journey through place, there was a particular pace to the listening event. The use of radio broadcast meant that there was no opportunity to fast-forward or rewind. Many attendees knew someone featured on ECOTONE and so came with the intention of hearing that one person, but because of how the installation was designed, they often had to stay at the event longer than intended and heard many new voices in the meantime. As Ger said in one feedback interview: ‘on the way to listen to whom you think you want to hear, you’ll find one that was very interesting that you didn’t expect’ (Feedback Track, 3.38). In the same way that I had spent longer periods of time in stillness, in place, and in the process of listening while making ECOTONE, attendees spent an elongated period of time listening at Ringmoylan. They met neighbours, were offered tea, and lingered on to hear the entire one-hour twenty-minute cycle.

The event provided for a multi-layered listening experience. The real, natural soundscape of Ringmoylan Pier and the pre-designed soundscape of ECOTONE were heard simultaneously, interacting with one another and merging into one sonic experience for the listener. The version of place I gathered, edited, and composed was layered with people chatting at Ringmoylan, cars driving in and out and even swimmers taking to the water. People often commented on, reacted to, and expanded upon what they heard in conversation with their fellow listeners. This gave both a sense of simultaneity and continuity. The conversations I recorded, edited and re-presented were echoed on the pier. Deep mapping is an open-ended process, constantly unfolding and open for contestation (McLucas n.d.). The voices and conversations recorded as part of ECOTONE were echoed in the real-time conversations between attendees, reminding us of the many stories yet to be recorded and heard, the un-ending process of exploring and expressing place. 

Sounding Place and Sounding People

ECOTONE exists within a constellation of fields of research and creative practice. Various approaches to deep mapping and sonic mapping have informed the research along with scholarship in the spheres of geography, literature, and visual art which offer alternative or creative renderings of place. Within deep mapping I drew upon a diversity of approaches including the performance ethnography of Pearson and Shanks (2001) and the sonic artworks of Selina Springett (2015). In recent years many deep mapping projects have embraced new technologies and GIS systems to create detailed multi-media representations of place. Bodenhamer et al.’s Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (2015) features a number of projects that use spatial technology and softwares in the creation of deep maps. In the Irish context the Deep Maps: West Cork Coastal Culturesproject led by Claire Connolly and Rob McAllen (Connolly and others 2020) and the Deep Mapping Kerry (Deep Maps Kerry) project both use web-based platforms to enable users to direct their own journey through the various layers of the deep map. Irish examples of deep mapping also include more abstract, immersive and site-specific art pieces such as Silvia Loeffler’s Transit Gateway: A Deep Mapping of Dublin Port. Loeffler worked with local participants to produce handmade books documenting their experience of different locations around Dún Laoghaire Harbour. These were displayed as part of an installation which also featured large fabric maps of the area dating from the medieval period. These fabric maps could be viewed, walked through and touched, offering a sensuous and immersive experience of deep mapping (Loeffler 2016).

Deep mapping projects such as Loeffler’s have the potential to question how traditional cartography presents space and place. Similar to feminist critiques of cartography, they can question pre-existing normative structures and act as an ‘undoing’ of hegemonic understandings of space and place (Springett 2015: 93). Harriet Hawkins states that deep mapping offers ‘novel disjunctions of the dissimilar’ in its presentation of place as assemblage, and, through this, new, more expansive, interpretations of place can emerge (2015: 252). These ideas correspond with Doreen Massey’s description of space as ‘contemporaneous plurality’ (2005: 9), an event, a coming together of history and geography that is not necessarily coherent. Place is a convergence of trajectories that may be unrelated, which she describes as ‘a simultaneity of stories-so-far’ (2005: 9). Along with deep mapping, creative work in the fields of geography and cartography has also illustrated the continuously evolving story of place, the many voices and registers of speech. The exploration of place on an intimate scale, for example, through ‘small stories’ that pertain to the local, the personal, and the mundane, highlights the particular and the specific in our understanding of place (Cameron 2012). Landscape biography is a similar holistic approach in which information on local place names, customs, anecdotes, and personal views on the landscape are woven together to form representations of place (Shakespeare and Russell-O’Connor 2022). This process acknowledges various scales of study and highlights the interaction of human and environment. The use story, memory, and the specific can lead to projects that confront social and cultural issues and strive towards a more democratic, immersive, and engaged form of storytelling — a plurivocal rendering of place.

The field of sonic mapping has of course informed how I sound these stories of place. Annea Lockwood’s River archive (1989) and Aileen Dillane and Tony Langlois’s LimerickSoundscapes project (2021) present environmental sounds and voices from the landscape as a way of documenting and discussing the sonic environment. Similar to how deep mapping has developed in recent years, sonic mapping has become closely tied with GIS technologies and mobile devices, allowing users to experience digitally recorded sound, which is connected to, inspired by, or recorded in, a particular location. Peter McMurray notes the contradiction of these platforms however, between the ‘exact’ nature of cartography and the creative work of recording and editing sound: ‘The cartographic precision of pin-pointed coordinates on a web-based map also can deceive us into presuming some kind of documentary truthfulness about a sonic real captured in audio that is in fact a highly mediated chain of imagined listenings’ (2018: 113). Like any creative rendering of place, deep mapping and sonic mapping bring place into the realm of the imagined and the sublime, they are place as seen and heard by the artist.

Place as Polyverse

The word ‘ecotone’ describes a transitional area between two different plant communities, such as forest or grassland. It can also occur where one body of water meets another, for example an estuary (Allaby 2020). ECOTONE was, as its name suggests, a series of meetings or gatherings: I met with local people to record their stories; I brought deep mapping ideas together with my artistic practice to create the installation; listeners gathered at Ringmoylan to hear ECOTONE, and their own experiences of place conversed with what they heard. The result of these ‘meetings’ was a process and artwork which engaged with, and presented, place as ‘polyverse’ (Modeen and Biggs 2020: 64), and fostered a renewed sense of connection between people and place, and artist and place.

Listening and Layering

Throughout the creation of ECOTONE, listening was a process of tuning in to different frequencies to discover sounds and stories I had not heard before. Deep mapping led me to a slower, more open, style of recording, researching, and interviewing, in which the process of mapping became more important than the creation of the deep map. As Les Roberts says about the deep mapping process:

Whether or not we wish to call what emerges from this process a ‘map’ (or the process itself ‘mapping’) seems to me less important than the fact that it is taking place at all. In its most quotidian sense, then, deep mapping can be looked upon as an embodied and reflexive immersion in a life that is lived and performed spatially. A cartography of depth. A diving within. (Roberts 2016: xiv)

Inspired by the depth and scope of deep mapping, I engaged in a process of deep listening to both place and people (Koch 2020; Oliveros 2005). I gathered reflections on place from a broad range of sources and searched for stories in the people I knew, as well as strangers and newcomers to the parish. I also examined secondary sources and historical accounts in order to add a temporal depth to my representation of Kildimo-Pallaskenry. In my interviews I sought out contrasting experiences to my own and in my field recording I turned my attention to the natural sounds of the environment and to the soundscape of community. ECOTONE favoured no one voice and moved through historical accounts, songs, the reflections of children and the mythological story of the Sionna with relative ease. The various voices and sounds gathered and created were considered equally relevant and important throughout the deep mapping process.

There was multiplicity to what I gathered for ECOTONE, but the work was also multi-layered in how it was presented. Using a digital audio workspace such as Logic Pro, I could layer sounds and stories and melodies of this place — the many ‘maps’ of Kildimo-Pallaskenry — on top of one another, and move ‘through’ them by fading in and out of each of the tracks. Artist and researcher Cliff McLucas says of deep maps: ‘they will embrace a range of different media or registers in a sophisticated and multilayered orchestration’ (n.d.). The orchestration and arrangement of the audio sources in ECOTONE allowed for a ‘plurivocal’ account of place. As Mary Modeen and Iain Biggs say, deep mapping involves engaging with the world ‘as polyverse’ (Modeen and Biggs 2020: 64). The presentation of ECOTONE as part of a sound installation extended this idea and allowed for a multi-layered listening experience. While attendees listened to the pre-recorded ECOTONE soundscape, they were also hearing the live soundscape of Ringmoylan Pier and the chatter of other attendees, walkers, and swimmers. The soundscape and the real world of Ringmoylan Pier were heard simultaneously. This overlap of past and present, stories recorded and stories emerging in real-time, highlighted the open-ended, layered and complex nature of deep mapping.

Connection

The process of deep mapping brought me, the artist, on a journey of re-connection with place and people. I engaged in a concentrated period of listening to my surroundings, and I then used my own creative language to respond to place. Throughout the composing, editing and arranging of ECOTONE I reflected on my journey through Kildimo-Pallaskenry. I created an artwork which I believe captures the warmth and openness of the people I met, and the modal, in-betweenness of the local environment and estuary. The value of spending time speaking to and listening to people was highlighted by some those who came to the ECOTONE event at Ringmoylan Pier. During a feedback interview, Ger said:

There’s a story behind every face, person, age, we all have a story to tell… I think it’s the time. Literally to take the time and to share the time for someone to speak and someone to listen, you know, we don’t do it enough, we’re so busy. (Feedback Track, 0.50, 1.50)

As well as his pleasure in hearing the voices of other people, Stefan remarked on the power of hearing his own voice broadcast on the pier: ‘when in life do you get a production about yourself, or part of yourself, it’s always about something else’ (Feedback Track, 1.36). It was important to me to feature a large variety of voices in ECOTONE. The greater the variety of voices and reflections I gathered, the more people, like Stefan, who would hear themselves in the work, and the more people who would sense the familiar, access their own memories, and join this conversation around place. For some attendees, this multi-layered approach highlighted the connections that people of Kildimo-Pallaskenry shared. Maureen spoke about how everyone ‘was connected to the one place for different reasons. I thought that was interesting’ (Feedback Track, 1.19). Maeve, who visits Ringmoylan several times a week, said it was interesting to hear different perspectives on a place so familiar to her: ‘how I see it and how they see it’ (Feedback Track, 0.20). In this way, ECOTONE brought to light the multiple perspectives or realities that exist around us. As well as allowing for connections between people, and people and place, to be drawn by each individual listener, ECOTONE offered connections between the past, present and future of Kildimo-Pallaskenry: Kathleen King talked about the past life of Ringmoylan as a busy summer swimming spot; Orla, Stefan, and Tony spoke about the current swimming group at the pier; and the schoolchildren explored what Kildimo-Pallakenry would look like in fifty years’ time. The soundscape constantly moved though these different temporal zones, these time-stamped maps.

Composing Place

Through the composition of new music and the editing of existing sounds I aimed to interpret and express Kildimo-Pallaskenry. I responded to the particularities of this place, including its liminal, transitional nature, and the warmth, humour and openness of its people. Composition was a method of processing place through a dialogue between my musical background, the soundscape of Kildimo-Pallaskenry and my feelings towards it. I believe this is a novel approach to deep mapping, engaging a personal, imaginative and emotional voice in sonically representing place. This subjective approach is shared by literary cartographers and psycho-geographers such as Tim Robinson and Iain Sinclair. In their literary works place undergoes a transformation in the mind of the artist, what philosopher Edward Casey describes in his examination of Western landscape painting as a ‘subliming’ of place (2002). Landscape paintings and maps, he argues, go beyond mere repetition or replacement: ‘they present again, at another and more sublime level, what is first of all presented in perception’ (270). Throughout my sonic deep mapping of Kildimo-Pallaskenry recording and editing local stories and sounds, and arranging and composing music, were my tools of excavation and presentation. ECOTONE, therefore, exists within a matrix of works by geographers, writers, sound recordists, and artists who imaginatively represent place in a way that is subjective, sensuous, and sublime.

Sonic Deep Mapping

I believe this research offers a template and toolkit for sonic deep mapping, which can be re-shaped and re-created globally. The medium of sound is ideally suited to the practice of deep mapping for a number of reasons. Firstly, sound has powerful emotional and imaginative qualities. It brings us intimately close to people and place through the use of field recordings, audio interviews and audio narratives, while also engaging our imagination and allowing our mind’s eye to travel to composed or hyperreal places. Through the creative editing of sound, we can connect the real to the imagined and, in this way, offer the listener an expanded experience of place. Secondly, audio editing technology allows for a layering of sounds. These layers can be edited in such a way that conversations, connections, and contrasts between these different layers can emerge. Finally, audio allows for diverse dissemination opportunities. Fixed audio pieces can be shared easily on online platforms such as SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and YouTube, and on local and national radio. Audio installations, soundwalks and group listening events allow sonic deep mappings to be site-specific and accessible for a physical audience. There is also, I believe, an accessibility to the audio arts. Affordable recording equipment and editing technology is widely available and audio artworks can often be made using only a smartphone. Due to these advancements the voices of artists and communities can be easily gathered, shared and accumulated to create sonic deep mappings in many settings around the world. As shown in Deep Maps and Spatial Narratives (Bodenhamer and others 2015) geo-information technologies and web-based platforms are becoming common tools in deep mapping. In my sonic deep mapping process, I advocate for a more Heat-Moon style approach. My artworks depended on the author or artist making a journey through place and making creative decisions about what to include and how to edit. It required an artistic response to place, the artist in the role of author or guide to lead us into place and reveal the many stories it can hold. I believe the process of deep mapping sonic stories could help people around the world connect with each other and with place, in a deep, communal and imaginative way.

[1] EQ is the process of boosting or reducing particular frequencies in a given audio sample. ↩︎

[2] Reverb is created when a sound occurs in a space. Different kinds of reverb can be created digitally in a DAW. ↩︎

Acknowledgement

The research conducted in this publication was funded by the Irish Research Council under project ID [GOIPG/2021/1363]

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