Hearing Place

This work is based on the recording that I captured at The Piccadilly Circus, in London, on Tuesday 16th May 2000. The day was warm (24º celsius) and sunny, I remember it was one of the warmest days in London during that May. During the Piccadilly Circus recording I stayed so near the traffic that my microphone almost hit the passing vehicles. The main focus in the Vroom!! is in the sounds of rush hour - sounds of cars, motorbikes, ambulances, car brakes, signal horns … Only a few unclear speech fragments are possible to hear, coming from people talking while they walked behind me.

The Home Planet consists almost exclusively of environmental sounds. As with many of the classic concrète works of the 1950s, the listener can often identify familiar sounds (for instance, of birds singing at dawn, the bells of a nearby church, etc.). These familiar sounds are, in effect, ‘themes’ and are subjected to an enormous range of transformation by such classical techniques as speed, transposition and reversal as well as more recent techniques, such as granulation. Perhaps this digital musique concrète can provide a sense of the musicality heard in the sounds of a summer day in upstate New York.

Your 3 Minute Mardi Gras is a rapid-fire portrait of New Orleans’ 2001 Mardi Gras. My aim is to preserve the meaning and the melody of speech, as well as unearth the unintended polyphony of the event. No layering or time juggling, just lots of aggressive old-fashioned linear 2-track (left and right channel synchronous!) editing. Your 3 Minute Mardi Gras is the third in my series of aural safaris capturing risky (and at times dangerous) sonic environments.

Sydney Sound Walk is based on field recordings made between the Archibald Fountain and Customs House Square in Sydney, May 2000. The work explores these discovered sounds - sometimes transformed in the studio to reveal deeper sonic relationships - taking the listener on a virtual walk of the city.

October 28, 1998: the famous beaches of Nha Trang on the central coast of Vietnam are soaked by unseasonably strong rain. This unedited recording documents my walk along the beach and back to my hotel in a plastic poncho. I recorded it wearing binaural-like microphones near my ears: the record-player crackle is rain falling on plastic. I return to this recording often, for the way it juxtaposes the familiar and the unfamiliar, making music where I did not expect to find it.

decemberYard is built upon recordings made of the sounds heard in our inner city Brisbane yard on the 11th and 12th of December 2002. Four recordings of 60 minutes duration were made, starting at 5:00 am, 11:00 am, 5:00 pm, and 11:00 pm. The order of the recordings is preserved so that the transition in sounds reflects 24 hours of acoustic changes in the yard. Some signal processing has been used, with small segments of the recorded sounds acting as impulse responses for the filter design.

Vocal Strolls are a series of recordings created using binaural stereo microphones on walks around my London neighbourhood, listening to its sounds and responding with vocal improvisation. These recordings have been transmitted weekly on London’s Resonance FM art radio. The fact of the human presence and its relation to London’s soundscape is clearly embodied in this work. That presence created the tumult that sometimes drowns out the human voice and sometimes becomes a complex and perfect accompaniment to it. Issues of acoustic ecology vie with an aesthetic enjoyment of urban noise.

There are sounds of a city that are functions of its daily running, but inaudible and thus unknown for us. The sounds here are those of sewerage systems, hydraulic turbines, water pumps and garbage disposal. All sounds are “natural” and none have been modified. All are recorded subterranean. They are simply cut and sequenced by a probability theory algorithm. The composer thanks for their kind collaboration: the sewerage system, hydroelectric and drinking water, and garbage disposal departments of Geneva. Le Souterrain was commissioned by Archipel Festival Genève in 2002.

Lagom is a common Swedish word and means ‘well, it’s okay’. It symbolises the willingness of the Swedes to compromise. The composition is an acoustical story on Sweden using soundscape material from the seventies and nineties. The objet musicales of the piece Lagom are sounds relating to the three elements water, air, earth. Sounds of water (like sea, lake, waterball), sounds of air (voices, breathing, birds) and sounds of earth (steps, football, tennis, etc.) are composed to a dense sonic landscape. Sounds of different ball games form rhythmical structures. The acoustic space of the piece is shaped with sounds of train, tram and skateboards.

Hawk Study is one section of a larger series of works based on sounds collected while travelling in Canada over the past year and a half. Since the summer of 2001, I have had the good fortune to spend several weeks in both remote and urban areas of Ontario and Quebec listening, soundwalking, composing and sharing in the listening experiences of others. The majority of sounds used in Hawk Study were collected from a hillside overlooking 565 very quiet acres of rolling hills, meadows and ponds in a remote corner of the province of Quebec. The approach with all of the pieces in the series is to attempt to capture my physical and emotional responses to the act of listening deeply and attentively so as to reflect not only on the soundscape as an aural experience but also to consider the broader human implications of what it means to be an ear-witness to a particular sound, in a particular place, at a particular moment in time.