Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness PROEFSCHRIFT Ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof.mr. P.F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor promoties, te verdedigen op dinsdag 6 december 2011, klokke 10.00 uur door Yolande Harris Geboren te Bournemouth, UK in 1975 Promotiecommissie: Promotoren: Prof. F.C.de Ruiter Universiteit Leiden Prof. Bob Gilmore PhD Brunel University, Uxbridge/ London Prof. David Dunn University Santa Fe Overige leden: Prof. Louis Andriessen Universiteit Leiden Dr. Marcel Cobussen Universiteit Leiden Prof. Brandon LaBelle PhD National Academy of the Arts, Bergen en de Freie Universität, Berlin Prof. David Toop University of the Arts, London Prof. Dr. Kitty Zijlmans Universiteit Leiden Dit proefschrift is geschreven als een gedeeltelijke vervulling van de vereisten voor het doctoraatsprogramma docARTES. De overblijvende vereiste bestaat uit een demonstratie van de onderzoeksresultaten in de vorm van een artistieke presentatie. Het docARTES programma is georganiseerd door het Orpheus Instituut te Gent. In samenwerking met de Universiteit Leiden, de Hogeschool der Kunsten Den Haag, het Conservatorium van Amsterdam, de Katholieke Universiteit Leuven en het Lemmensinstituut. Scorescapes: On Sound, Environment and Sonic Consciousness 1. Introduction: Sound Art and Environment 4 1.1 Sound and Environment from Practice 1.2 Towards an Active Engagement with Environment 1.3 Background Theories: Sound Art as an Emerging Interdisciplinary Field 1.4 Scorescapes Dissertation Overview 1.5 Overview of Creative Works presented as part of this Research Project 2. Score: the Score as Environment and the Environment as Score 20 2.1 Scores Re-Imagined 2.2 The Score as a Bridge between Sound, Self and Environment 2.3 How I arrived at the notion of Scorescapes through my practice. 2.4 Scorescapes: Sound and Place 2.5 Scorescapes in the Mind 2.6 Scores, Mapping and Navigation in my work 2.7 Scores and Relational Aesthetics 2.8 Scorescapes and Composition as Research 3. Scape: Investigating the Environment through Sound 31 3.1 Rethinking Land Art and Acoustic Ecology 3.2 Systems Aesthetics and Direct Involvement with Environment: Burnham, Bateson, Dunn, Schafer 3.3 From Prehistory to Eco-Aesthetics: Lippard and Dunn 3.4 Walking as Active Engagement with Environment 4. Inaudible: Sounds beyond Human Hearing 45 4.1 Why Make the Inaudible Audible? 4.2 How to make the Inaudible Audible: Visualisation, Audification and Sonification 4.3 Audification 4.4 Sonification 4.5 Sun Run Sun : an example of compositional process of sonifcation 4.6 Listening Table of Contents, Yolande Harris 1 5. Whale: An Investigation of Underwater Sound 57 5.1 Fishing for Sound 5.2 Underwater Sound 5.3 Understanding Biological Ecosystems Through Underwater Sound 5.4 Sonic Evidence and the Composer 5.5 The Whale as a Stage 5.6 Humpback Whale Songs 5.7 Sperm Whale RIME’s 5.8 Alvin Lucier’s Quasimodo the Great Lover 5.9 Physically Experiencing Sonic Processes 5.10 Long Distance Sounds 5.11 (Inter-Species) Communication, Evolution, Music 5.12 Underwater Sound in Scorescapes 6. Field: Place and Embodiment in Field Recording 89 6.1 Issues in Field Recording 6.2 Questions of Place: the Composer and Field Recordings 6.3 What is actually happening when I listen to a recording? Schizophonia, Real/Virtual, Body. 6.4 An Informed Listener or Sonic Colonialism? 6.5 Field Recordings, Anthropogenic Sound and Bio-Acoustics 6.6 Field as a State of Mind 6.7 My Personal Approach to Field Recordings 7. Flare: Charging the Space between Intuition and Technology 100 7.1 Flare 7.2 Explosion 7.3 Energy and Sonic Vibration 7.4 Sound, Image, Perception and Technology 7.5 Sound Flares: Pink Noise 7.6 Tropical Storm: Re-living an Intense Environment in a Site-Specific Installation 7.7 EMDR Clicks: Therapy for Future Flooding 7.8 Tips for Dreaming: Swim and Fishing for Sound 7.9 Instruments in Environment: Towards a 'Techno-Intuition' Through Sound 7.10 Conclusion Abstract 122 Samenvatting 124 Acknowledgements 127 Biography 129 Table of Contents, Yolande Harris 2 References Appendix 1: Contents of Documentation DVD Appendix 2: Chronology of Work September 2008 - June 2011 Appendix 3: Biographies of Key Ind ividuals Table of Contents, Yolande Harris 3 1. Introduction: Sound Art and Environment 1.1 Sound and Environment from Practice Scorescapes explores sound, its image, and its role in relating humans and their technologies to the environment, embodying research in and through artistic practice. It investigates how qualities of sound can open up ways of thinking and experiencing urban, rural and extreme environments that may lead to a greater understanding of our relationship to those environments. This thesis explores the related questions of, first, how does sound mediate our relationship to environment, and second, how can contemporary multidisciplinary art practices articulate and explore this relation between sound and environment. The compositions and art works I have developed as part of the Scorescapes research build on my earlier works since the late 1990s to investigate these questions in a variety of ways: through sound walks with specially designed instruments, field recordings used in performance, site-specific audio-visual installations, graphic images, and collaborative performer-audience compositions. I use the term “environment” as a general and inclusive notion. It encompasses relationships between levels of natural, human and media environments that are built on top of each other and interpenetrate. Sound is a fundamental part of the environment in general and binds us to it, opening up aspects of awareness and meaning that may be overlooked in visually dominant cultures. Through my research on sound and environment, I have noted the following basic characteristics of sound as a medium: sound is contextual; it propagates and exists beyond boundaries of material matter, and so provokes relationships between sometimes distant beings in the human social world, the larger environment and non-human ecologies. Sound’s medium is air or water or solid matter, in vibration, containing information for a receiver about how it came into being. This forms a fundamental basis for interactions between diverse ecosystems of plants and animals. Because sound is both temporal and spatial, it blurs the distinctions between concepts of time and space. And sound resonates beyond its immediacy as something physically sensed and heard in the present moment, to an existence in memory and as a trigger for future psychological and associative meanings and behaviours. The insights just described on the characteristics of sound and how it forms relationship to the environment inform both my artistic practice and the theoretical considerations addressed in this dissertation. Chapter 1: Introduction, Yolande Harris, p4/121 The more I create artworks that interrogate relationship to the environment, the more I find that the situations I instigate are largely of a psychological nature. Each environment influences how we interact with it practically and emotionally. This interaction is not something that can be defined once, even with constant exposure to the same environment, but is constantly being redefined and renegotiated. With every new work I present, and with every new performance of it, the act of questioning and discovering a relationship to environment happens again, and in a different live form. These artworks and performances have led me to understand that activating sonic relationships with the environment opens up people’s awareness and attitudes to the world around them. In order to do this I have had to question ideas that put the audience in the position of a passive listener or onlooker (as in traditional visual art and classical music). Such situations impair the listeners’ ability to interact with their surroundings making experience of environment remote. It hinders the audiences’ interaction with the environment and the artist / composers ability to harness the dynamic potential of environmental interaction in their work. However, by being open to sound and listening, these assumptions or ‘filters’, to use composer Pauline Oliveros’ term (Oliveros, 2005), can be lifted to create the conditions to generate meaningful relationships to the environment and other people by being actively involved and immersed. 1.2 Towards an Active Engagement with Environment My artistic work explores the dynamic relationships between the environment and our cultural attempts to understand our place within it through the use of sound. I take an active approach to this, starting from the idea that we cannot observe as if from the outside but that we are implicitly involved in the environments we study and experience. This sense of of active engagement requires a shift in perspective and a re-learning of bodily and conscious qualities related to awareness. I am interested in both a techno-scientific understanding of environment, emphasising the interconnectedness of ecologies and systems, and a non- technological approach, attuning awareness of non-human environments through mind and body practices. The research presented in this thesis aims to learn more about the different ways in which the relationship between technological and non-technological practices embed us within the larger systems of our environment. There is a long tradition of artists and musicians engaging with the topic of environment in their work. Particularly in the last half century there has developed a foundational discourse around sound, place and environment rooted in the work of Land Art and the Acoustic Chapter 1: Introduction, Yolande Harris, p5/121 Ecology movement, both emerging in the 1970’s. Land Art, pioneered by artists such as Robert Smithson and Richard Long, used elements of the landscape itself as artistic material, often in remote wilderness locations, challenging assumptions about the gallery system of the visual art world. Acoustic Ecology, the study of sonic relationships between the environment and living beings, grew out of the World Soundscape Project begun in Canada by composers R.