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This work began with a field recording trip, Murmurations, at the Spittle of Glenshee. Here the ubiquity of water opened a link from Leibnitz (and affect theory) to my developing approaches of gathering from multiple points and looking for ‘elements’ of ‘microshocks’ (Massumi) in these. 

I tested out the making of a space with these gathered ‘microelements’, and additionally considered my role as an embodied researcher and ‘in the work’ through this process. Reflecting on the praxis and work made, recognising that this is a bringing together of elements. 

There were other iterations (links in this text) that gave small insights, but it was the initial piece made that informed significant developments in my knowledge.

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Chapter Five 

The Cairngorms: research developing through a recording trip, works made, and beginning to make ‘spaces’.

Other iterations made with the materials:

There were other iterations of this work; a track ‘Shee water’#2 July 2018, a restaging ‘Shee water’ #3 at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire November 2018,  These helped me clarify further some thoughts from the initial iteration. The track making it clear I wanted to make an ‘environment’ that you could physically be in, the restaging the importance of the space and positioning of the materials, the space which was in a public area of the building near a café, changed daily across three days of reflecting and testing out different set ups, it was useful to recognise that the sounds of a space could be ‘too much’ for my work, but that you can still construct ‘moments’ when people might ‘step into’ (or sit down within) what you have made and shift somewhere else, but the material didn’t feel ‘with’ the new space they were in – they always felt separate, bringing in an understanding of the balance required. 

Murmurations, Spittle of Glenshee:

This body of work and research began with a six-day field recording trip with artists Jez Riley French and Chris Watson to the Cairngorms National Park in June 2018.  To expand on understanding advanced through Early tests & experiments I planned to gather materials from a few locations, concentrating on recording in several ways from a specific point at each, at some, potentially returning across the trip. I wanted to have ‘clear’ ‘elements’ of sound from each place recorded using a range of techniques and equipment, so I could layer them up and develop what learned from the ‘Norfolk’ piece. I used structures, a map or parameters to help bring form to the transitory and shifting elements and intending to roughly ‘draw out’ the spaces I recorded in, later utilising that ‘mapping’ as a starting point for how I might construct the spaces I put the elements into.

This trip gave me concentrated time and access to equipment to extend my recording skills and develop my approaches to my gathering, it also gave opportunity to discuss work and approaches with the others there. The locations were somewhat arbitrary, not necessarily where I would have chosen to make work regarding, but this gave the possibility of working with them more dispassionately, I could think more technically and explore techniques and approaches to recording different aspects of the sounds. I ‘gathered’ at several locations, wood ants in a forest, wildflowers with insects and by a stream. There is a ubiquity of water sounds in the area, so recording by the stream, felt very much ‘of the environment’.

Bringing things together, the never singleness, activeness and event in the practice: 

My thinking was coalescing, I had begun to describe what I am aiming to ‘gather’ as ‘microelements ‘thinking of this as ‘stuff’ that is a part of microshocks, that initiates so our bodies ‘act’ and re-act. I am looking for ‘microelements’ that are parts of the auditory ecologies that are around us all the time and non-conscious inform us about our environment. So, my ‘microelements’ of ‘stuff’ are parts of or closely akin to what Massumi describes as microshocks[1], which come from Leibnitz’s (Monadology) petit perceptions and describes thus, ‘there are hundreds of indications leading us to conclude that at every moment there is in us an infinity of perceptions, unaccompanied by awareness or reflection’ (Leibniz 1996, p. 53).

In this work in the Cairngorms, aiming to through my ‘affect heuristic’, gather sound from one point/location but through many angles and approaches, considering the multifaceted and active nature of affect, the manyness of its forms’ (Massumi 2009 p.3), and working in this way as ‘The concept of micro-perception places the emphasis clearly on the act of combining an enactive relational process and the potential – the virtual inherent within this process – rather than on the perception of somehow individual ‘completed’ sounds (a representational process)’. (Goodman 2013 p.11), with the aim that these ‘microelements’, can, as parts I construct with, have the potential to activate and make spaces of what Massumi might describe as an intensity, and I describe as an affecting atmosphere.

In the test work Shee Water I was investigating bringing together of elements; gathered ‘microelements’, the table, equipment, the space and its wider environment, (link to images). Taking the materials from a representation/recording to a new and active situation. Transitions, shifts and changes are ‘felt’, it is in part these sorts of qualities that I am ‘sensing for’ as I work, exploring in how things come together, in a dynamic situation, bringing the theory into play with the material as I work, so that otherbodies might experience affect.

The Atkin’s piece (Bastards, 2014)[2], is an assembly of generated images and sounds, that cuts and shifts, partially lets you see into a space, whilst opening another. I was affected by my encounter with the work, I carry it with me. Bodies carry forward with us understanding from previous experience, this “... cannot be but a layered construction of all the thoughts and words and sounds that have been me….my every now, with its load of thens crashing into it” (Casella in Carlyle and Lane 2013 p.85) and meeting ‘together’ in a space, always in flux. Massumi says ‘What is in question is precisely the emergence of the subject, its primary constitution, or its reemergence and reconstitution. The subject of an experience emerges from a field of conditions which are not that subject yet, where it is just coming into itself.’ (2009 p. 4). Like the “microelements’ coming together in the works I construct, they are also coming together in my thinking through the doing. The potentials of this bringing together of many elements to “form an affecting entanglement” which makes an event, reveals possibilities of remediating, taking a gathered sound from a “moment” and putting it with others in a different “moment”, building an experience out of other experience. 

Leibnitz in the ubiquities and never singularness of water: 

The decision to work with/around the water was in part pragmatic, its sound so omnipresent in the environment, and because of the proximity of a stretch of the Shee Water to where we were staying. It was just before a small, arched, stone road bridge, a point where it meandered, faster moving in the centre with shallows over stones at the edges, giving access to a wide range of water sounds. I was ‘looking’ for the many-faceted and fluctuating multitude of microelements of sound to gather and then work with. Water as is sound, is ever-moving and shifting, mingling and merging.

Leibnitz outlines petit perceptions through the sounds of the ocean, and as being made up of a multitude of smaller sounds, linking to my ‘microelements’, these ‘little’ sounds, are a grain of sand hitting another, a water droplet hitting a stone. Lambert (2013 p. 89) describes this, saying Leibnitz; ‘uses the example of the sound of the wave. Although we hear that sound, we do not precisely distinguish each drop colliding into one another. If those micro-collisions were not providing a sound however, we would not hear the sound of the wave globally.’ This concept of a microperception as elements of what becomes a global sound, informed my thinking when trying to record the many points and parts of the sounds of water[1]. ‘The mind must be slowed to catch the million transformations of the water, on sand, on shale, against driftwood, against the seawall. Each drop tinkles at a different pitch’ (Shafer 1994, p.16), which is redolent of Masumi’s ‘manyness’ of affect, linking them as multifaceted and multitudinal in form. 

I recorded over three days at The Shee Water, reviewing and reflecting as I went along, gathering at each visit in different ways; under the water’s surface with a hydrophone, sounds of pebbles and stones being moved, sounds of the water’s surface splashes with a parabolic[2]. Testing out approaches to gather different parts of the sounds. My aim, to gather ‘microelements’ to then ‘construct ‘, ‘compose’, ‘orchestrate’ them into new moments of event.

Microperceptions: 

Microperceptions (Deleuze and Guattari 2004) or Masumi’s microshocks inform/trigger bodily response and are parts of what make affect occur. These do not have to be dramatic, microshocks are the things ‘that populate every moment of our lives….a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision’ (Massumi 2009 p. 3) These shifts of attentions, interruptions, are not consciously noticed in themselves, but we are aware of the affect, as the ‘concept of affect is tied to the idea of modulating occurring at a constitutive level where many somethings are doing, most of them unfelt. Or again felt only in effect.’ (Massumi 2009 p. 4) In our moments of being aware of ‘its’ effect on our bodies, we want/need to turn and look or flinch, these things that “act upon us” and “make us act”. 

Singularly ‘microelements’ may not represent or tell us much, but when combined, a ‘picture’, an atmosphere, builds up and begins to emerge, just as the sea is the sound of many drops, pebbles, bubbles etc., Leibnitz also describes the sound of crowds of people, sound happens because something active, an event, occurs, made of many small parts, generating affects in the bodies of those who are part of them. No event or response can be static or the same, these are moments in time that cannot be repeated. We do ‘remember’, and then these things can be ‘reactivated’ in us at other moments. Considering my ‘microelements’ as thigs that cause ‘microshocks’ and as ‘stuff’ of our everyday sound ecologies, things we encounter, experience and respond to, opens an approach for and what to gather. Adding to this that these ‘microelements’ can be combined to give us a ‘picture’, then that has potential for ‘an event’ to occur, and it might bring us to memory. Together these combine into a new approach for my gathering and to making spaces of embodied encounter.

I see a strong link between the description of microperception that Massumi gives us as non-conscious and on the periphery of awareness and how we experience our everyday aural landscape, how it non-consciously informs us regarding the world around us. When I was first learning about spatial sound recording, it was suggested swapping around my headphones, experiencing the audio of the space, ‘back to front’, and even though the visual information told me that something was dropped to my right, I looked left. Goodman describes sound in the context of microperception and relating to ‘pre-cognition’ and a ‘wholly bodily’ response, using the example of a wasp in a pitcher plant and a response to / microperception of a resonant frequency of sound, triggering the release of pollen, a ‘…. sound-as-vibrational force coursing through ecologies at pre-subjective, pre-content and pre-contextual levels, (Goodman 2013 p.3). 

Sound is a physical thing, the movement of molecules, a traveling as others are ‘moved’. This physical, bodily process links very closely to Leibniz’ descriptions of petit perceptions, but sound is not only that physical, (and maybe other physical) sensation/s, it is also what we make of those sensations. My process is centred in my personal bodily response as a subjective crip/neurodivergent bodymind.

The making of a ‘space’: 

In July 2018 there was basement space arranged for PhD sharing to testing works and have discussion. I wanted to use this opportunity to make a larger work, further exploring investigating knowledge from Early Tests & Experiments, that for there to be potentials for embodied affective response, multiple elements to interact is required and the set-up be one where the ‘audience’ is not an external viewer. Additionally, I would work heuristically with the gathered materials, bringing (micro)elements together to construct a space using multiple channels of audio and video, developing the work through my response to what happened in the process.

I had not previously set up audio through a speaker array that I could edit ‘live’, this allowed me to work ‘in the moment’, an exploratory approach of not trying to ‘recreate’ by to make that felt redolent of my layered experience of the Shee water. This felt an appropriate way of working, constructing a space of encounter, through being in it and experiencing. I set the equipment up around a table on which were my laptop and a notebook, with diagrams and thoughts from the recording trip. I could listen to the array as I worked, a very particular set up with ‘me’ at the centre. I changed the positioning of speakers, projectors, the channel of tracks and altered elements and volume in tracks, until I felt I had a rough ‘space’. There were 6 mono tracks and 3 video projections[1]. (documentary video here) through the process considering/holding in mind how microshocks might occur through the brining together of smaller ‘elements’, and that these might make ‘something’ of affect. 

My microelements the channels of audio and video, working with the snippets and glimpses, shifting and movement in relation to each other, ‘I constructed a place, I channel a presence, as a frayed palimpsest of notated experiences, anticipations, recollections’ (Casella in Carlyle and Lane 2013 p.85 )The ‘desk’ was the middle point from which to experience the work, people sat in ‘my seat’ and ‘became’ me, had view of the software, my notebook, pencil, and coffee cup[2], or they sat and stood ‘in’ the projected flow of the water. I was residually still ‘there’.

The discussion around my piece was very informative, allowing me a moment of critical distance, to see the work as the ‘audience’ did and reflect. We discussed; the audience being ‘me’, that the set up made a sort of ‘expanded diagram’, that as everything was visible there was no ‘magic’ and that the positioning under a window meant you could hear the street and the traffic behind and above you, with the stream in front and below, putting the ‘viewer’ in a liminal space, between the commonplace day-to-day of the city and outdoor space with water, ‘the seeping edge of the virtual’ , (Massumi 2002 p.43) in the porous surfaces of the soundscapes. There were comments regarding the light of the projections in a semi lit space being a bit like wading in water, and that shutting your eyes meant being taken to this other place, but with eyes open the space felt dystopian, the materials from a bright sunny day in a semi-dark basement, 

Putting the audience in a position of experiencing ‘as me’, to share my encounter, being in my ‘position’ is very apposite. The gathering trip, and this sharing, where ‘immersive interaction carrying over into reflection and speculation towards new understandings (Gray and Delday 2011 p.4). I began to understand through the doing of the making of the piece, my own opportunity to reflect and the comments of others the importance of; the spatiality gathered in the audio to carry a sense of environment, my layering and mingling of microelements to create affecting atmospheres, and my place in this as an embodied active researcher