2.2.2. Inside the Recordist’s Head
Anthropological field recordings convey virtually no trace of the recordist’s thoughts and emotions to the listener. In sonic arts, on the contrary, several artists have proposed to project the recordist’s inner states, through the recordist’s voice, straight onto the recording. Isobel Anderson and Tullis Rennie identify an arc of “self-reflexive narratives” that runs from Luc Ferrari’s multiple versions of Presque Rien (1967 onwards) to Jennifer Heuson’s Soundscapes of the Black Hills (2009), through Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989) and Janet Cardiff’s soundwalks (1990s onwards), among others (Anderson and Rennie 2016). The authors themselves experimented on several occasions with the genre. Their method of editing draws inspiration from anthropological fieldwork, particularly from Gregory Barz’s reflection on “fieldnotes” (cf. Rennie 2017). Barz (2008) uses three typefaces to render the layering of three “voices” in text:
- fieldnote taken on the spot;
- “headnote,” which he defines following Simon Ottenberg as “a memory associated with a specific field experience”;
- binding narrative.
The compositions of Rennie and Anderson translate this layering into actual voices inscribed into the field recording composition. Anthropology could perhaps draw some inspiration from these experiments, which it inspired in the first place. Dialogic editing, for instance, might become a reality for the listener as well, if the recordist’s thoughts and emotions were voiced and the dialogue itself audible. On the other hand, it is important to stress that “self-reflexive narratives” are, precisely, not dialogues. Ferrari, for one, was concerned with dreams and internal states, not so much with an external field and its inhabitants.
In Presque Rien N°2 we find elements which resemble music, but they immerse the listener in a kind of post-modern dream. These elements retrace the anecdotal transfer from realism to fiction, or the moments where the sounds of the real night are perceived inside the composer’s head. (Ferrari 1994, my translation)[9]
A friend of John Cage, Ferrari passed through musique concrète and was engaged at that time with minimalism. The title of the series (French for “nearly nothing”) reveals his artistic intention.
While looking for nearly nothing (presque rien), I realised that it’s not that easy to find. One thinks that one will find it here or there, but it’s not like that. A nearly nothing is a place that is homogeneous and natural, not urban, and has peculiar acoustic qualities (transparency and depth). One hears far and near without excess, one might say at the ear’s scale, at human scale, without technology. Nothing must be dominant, so that the different-sounding inhabitants each have their voice, and the superposition of all this little lively world never amounts to more than nearly nothing.
(Luc Ferrari in Caux 2002: 179).[10]
The point for Ferrari was not to add himself to a “field,” but rather to subtract from music (and from his own authorship), until it became “nearly nothing.” To term this a “field,” one must switch to another understanding where the word designates a quality that permeates and binds together events through a mysterious impression of relatedness.