Ela Orleans / Lunar Odyssey / Summer 2018
Project Report
Lunar Odyssey : Ela Orleans Report written by Petra Pennington, September 2020 PROJECT REPORT
1. Introduction / The Project
2. The Artist
3. Events Friday Lunch: Ela Orleans, Music for Ears Guided Walk to the White Wood Huntly Folk Club at Harry’s Sound, Image & Place conference Premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes Subsequent screenings of film
4. Marketing
5. Education / Outreach Programme Lunar Odyssey Artist’s Talk Lunar Odyssey Day at Gordon Schools Artist’s visits to the Tin Hut and Huntly Folk Club sessions Artist’s visit to Huntly Mart
6. Events Statistics
7. Media
8. Evaluation
9. Legacy
10. Funding and Thanks
11. Appendices Appendix A – The evolution of a project proposal Appendix B – Ela Orleans in Conversation with Petra Pennington Appendix C - Deveron Express newsletter articles about Lunar Odyssey Appendix D - Poster, flyer and programmes from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix E - Michael Pattison’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix F - Prof Pete Stollery’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix G - Maja Zeco’s provocation cards from her Sound Walk at Sound, Image & Place conference Appendix H - Abby Beatrice Quick’s photographs from Sound, Image & Place conference
1. Introduction / The Project
Sounds for a future society
From June to September 2018, Polish audio-visual composer, Ela Orleans, was resident in Huntly, listening.
In 300 years, what will our local language sound like? Will the same birds sound be heard in and around Huntly? Will there be a town? Will we be thriving or even surviving?
Through the production of electronic music, video and a timeless language of symbols, Lunar Odyssey engaged us with our increasingly alien past culture before it is lost, and asks us to consider how we preserve and develop it to survive the unknown journey of our future. In response to the White Wood, Ela was to create an audio-visual time capsule to capture the sound of the past 100 years of the town and its lands, within the present-day framework of her electronic composition. Like Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record, it was to preserve and project our aural culture forwards into the time and space of an uncertain future. Lunar Odyssey aims to document local Scots and Doric language tied to the people and land, folksong, and sounds of the ecology – all of which have been threatened as the twentieth century progressed into the present.
Lunar Odyssey was a part of Ela’s’ PhD research at the music department at the University of Glasgow, for which she gained a Scottish Arts and Humanities Graduate School scholarship. The project reached its conclusion in October 2019, with the completion and premiere of the artist’s audio-visual film, Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, alongside a conference exploring project themes.
2. The Artist
Electronic musician, composer and audio-visual artist, Ela Orleans - originally from Poland - is a celebrated and published artist in the field of electronica and pop. Her albums have received the critics’ choice Dead Albatross Music Prize and been shortlisted for Scottish Album of the Year. Having lived and worked in Poland, New York and Glasgow, she has scored for movies and performed and DJ-ed internationally. In the summer of 2018, Orleans was resident in Huntly to work on Lunar Odyssey - a project exploring the audio-visual past and future of the town and its White Wood, as part of her PhD at the University of Glasgow. https://elaorleans.com/
3. Events
Friday Lunch: Ela Orleans, Music for Ears
On Friday 8 June 2018, Orleans gave an introduction to her musical, audio-visual and research work at one of our weekly Friday Lunches in the Brander kitchen. It was a chance for people from varied backgrounds to initially meet the artist and ask questions about the project themes. The event provided a springboard for further organic links to be made between the community and the Lunar Odyssey project.
Guided Walk to the White Wood
This summer solstice walk on 21 June was to be an elaboration of Orleans’ research into the soundscape and experience of the White Wood. The route trod the path which the artist had been considering scoring with a soundtrack, from the centre of Huntly out to into the countryside and up to the White Wood. The walk was led by Neil Theodoreson, Forestry Commission Community & Education Ranger for Aberdeenshire & Moray with insight into the local ecology. Unfortunately, Ela could not be present for the walk, having sustained an injury to her knee, although the event continued and was well attended.
Huntly Folk Club at Harry’s
To mark the end of Orleans’ residency, a farewell evening took place during the monthly Huntly Folk Club on Wednesday 15 August. The folk club - many of whom met and worked with the artist throughout the summer - met at Harry’s Bar, and it was an opportunity for relaxed discussion about the project themes, for the artist to record some final material, thank the musicians, and to jam.
Sound, Image & Place conference
It was decided that the final presentation of the work started through Ela Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey project would be framed by a full 1 ½ days’ conference in October 2019, exploring the project themes of soundscaping, audio-place-making and the relationship between sound and visuals. Speakers included Professor Pete Stollery (University of Aberdeen), audio-visual artist Maja Zećo, and Creative Director of Alchemy Film & Arts, Michael Pattison. (Dr Louise Harris, University of Glasgow, was also due to speak but could not attend.)
Programmed events included talks, discussions over meals catered by the Neep & Okra Kitchen, a sound walk of Huntly curated and led by Maja Zećo, and a projective walk imagining the layers of past and future cultural sounds of the town and ecology, led by Petra Pennington and Steve Brown. The immersive audio-visual and archival nature of Orleans’ work led to the conference being included in two north-east festivals; Sound Scotland and Across the Grain.
Premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes
The final audio-visual film work of Ela Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey residency was premiered on the evening of 24 October 2019, at Huntly Golf Club. After a curated selection of folk songs sung by Gaye Anthony, the film was introduced by Michael Pattison. Orleans conducted musicians Aaron Clark (accordion), Miguel M Padilla (flute) and Triple (3 piece acapella vocals) in a specially arranged additional live soundtrack to the film.
Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes features a wistful series of interviews intercut with a shimmering blend of archival imagery and footage and sound recorded during Orleans’ 2018 Huntly residency. The effect is a multi-layered collision of past and present; a rich tapestry of sentiments, relationships between sounds, sights, people and place. This ‘time capsule’ is an immersive filmic experience, rather like absorbing the sonic narratives of distant engine hums, human footsteps passing, the wind-borne rustling of leaves, and the immediacy and clarity of birdsong, as the dappled sunlit shadows and colours of the White Wood or avenue of Huntly’s linden trees fall into your eyes. Interviewees included former Huntly Cinema projectionist, the late Gordon McTavish, Barry Peter Ould of the Percy Grainger Society, White Wood forester and folk musician Steve Brown, and Deveron Projects’ Claudia Zeiske and Robyn Wolsey.
As part of the evening’s programme, Huntly-based performance group Dudendance also showed selected films with live musical accompaniment by Argentinian composer Fabiana Galante, and Triple. A Q&A session followed for the artists.
Subsequent screenings of film
Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes has also been screened at a community event held at 22/23 The Square in December 2019. Further screenings have been discussed, including the possibility of showing the film in the White Wood - the original inspiration for Orleans’ Lunar Odyssey residency.
Non-project events
While resident in Huntly, Orleans took part in other Deveron Projects events. On 25 June she led a Food Chain cookery workshop as part of our HOME programme, showing locals how to make her family recipe for Polish Barszcz (beetroot soup), Pierogi (cabbage dumplings) and Kompot (a fruit drink made with seasonal berries). Orleans also joined the Back O Bennachie bus tour as part of Refugee Festival Scotland, where women and children from both Syrian New Scots and ‘local’ communities visited cultural sites from coast to hilltop fort, exchanging friendship, food, song and dance along the way.
4. Marketing
Press ● The Autumn 2018 edition of the Deveron Express ‘Local Lunar Odyssey’ featured a critically-positioned editorial on the front cover, comparing Orleans’ audio-visual time capsule project to ‘Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record’. The article drew likeness between the unknown cultural, ecological and lingual future of Huntly’s next 300 years, and the depths of unexplored space into which the iconic NASA probe carried examples of Earth’s cultural identity. In the same periodical, Ela Orleans was interviewed by Art & Community Worker Petra Pennington about her time in Huntly, her working processes and the future context of local folk music. ● Several articles publicised the Sound, Image and Place conference to a local audience through the Huntly Express across the 3 weeks run-up to the event. These took different angles of focus/interest, from the academic themes of the conference, to the premiere performance-screening featuring live local musicians, to the film Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes being dedicated to the memory of the late Gordon McTavish, Huntly cinema projectionist whose local archival footage features heavily in the final film. A quarter- page advert for the conference and screening also reached local audiences. ● BBC Radio Scotland’s Janice Forsyth interviewed Ela Orleans about the Sound, Image and Place events, including the screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, for broadcast on The Afternoon Show during the week of the events. ● The Huntly Express gave the Sound, Image and Place events 5 columns of coverage following the event, and included photographer Abby Beatrice Quick’s images.
Print ● Sound, Image and Place conference and the premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes were listed in festival brochures for Sound Scotland and Across the Grain, distributed across Aberdeen and Aberdeenshire. ● To promote Sound, Image and Place locally, posters, flyers and mini-flyers were designed by Petra Pennington. ● Two programmes were produced for audiences at the day conference and the evening screenings, designed by Maja Zećo and Petra Pennington.
Online ● Orleans’ residency and events were promoted many times on both Deveron Projects’ and Ela Orleans’ social media channels. ● The Sound, Image and Place conference and performance-screening were promoted through the online listings, social media and booking platforms for both Sound Scotland festival and Across the Grain festival. ● Ela Orleans’ residency and events with Deveron Projects were also referred to on the following sites: alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk list.co.uk manicpopthrills.wordpress.com newmusicscotland.co.uk sgsah.ac.uk visitabdn.com ● On visualcultureaberdeen.wordpress.com, a March 2020 article by Visual Culture graduate student Valerie Safira discusses the influence of Lunar Odyssey on the premise and context of creative soundscaping.
5. Education / Outreach Programme
Lunar Odyssey Artist Talk
Ela Orleans’ Friday Lunch talk in June provided an initial background to the artist and her work, as well as introducing the project to a mixed audience, made up of young and old, local and those who travelled from farther afield and from varied backgrounds and interests. The event was a springboard for other community contacts, interests and influences which led directly into the development of her residency and project ideas. For example a subsequent Friday Lunch led Ela to meet Barry Peter Ould and discover the synergies between her work and that of multiphonic composer Percy Grainger, who had also been influenced by the local folk music of Huntly.
Lunar Odyssey Day at Gordon Schools
On 27th June, Ela Orleans spent a day at The Gordon Schools. Her visit started with a presentation about her work and a discussion of the themes behind her Lunar Odyssey project with S5/6 students of Art & Design. The afternoon was spent in the Music department, providing her musician’s and composer’s input to a performance session with S3/4 students, recording some of their pieces as well as meeting with S5/6 Advanced Higher music students and musicians of folk music from the greater student body. A further session was held with Modern Languages students, whom Ela recorded reciting anti-war poetry in a variety of languages, as a way of exploring the background themes of the White Wood, Ela’s original inspiration for Lunar Odyssey.
Artist’s visits to the Tin Hut and Huntly Folk Club sessions
Throughout the summer, Ela attended the open folk sessions at the Tin Hut (Gartly) and Huntly Folk Club. There she discussed her project and met many of the musicians she would go on to work with individually, and record to form structural elements of her developing soundtrack. She would later compose and conduct experimental arrangements containing fragments of their individual folk repertoires for the live performance which took place during the premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes.
Artist’s visit to Huntly Mart
Keen to capture sounds very specific to the cultural and ecological context of our town and its lands, Ela visited Huntly Auction Mart in July. Accompanied by interns Lauren Dixon and Alix Craig, she spent time recording ambient sounds from within the cattle market and having conversations with farmers and facility staff. This environment, which in sonic terms communicated the human-agricultural element of the town’s ecology, was in contrast to the session she spent recording sylvan birdsong at the White Wood and from the shelter of the leafy woodland garden of forester Steve Brown.
6. Event Statistics
Event No. of events Date Participants New Participants
Friday Lunch 1 8/6/18 15 (est) 3 (est)
Guided Walk 1 21/6/18 9 5
Folk Club at Harry’s 1 15/8/18 16 (est) 12 (est)
Conference 1 24-25/10/19 40 33
Premiere Screening 1 24/10/19 65 41
Total 5 --- 145 94
7. Media
Date Press Title
27/9/19 Huntly Express Musicians top festival bill
4/10/19 Huntly Express High notes in music festival
11/10/19 Huntly Express Film tribute to Huntly projectionist
11/10/19 Huntly Express (¼ page advert for Sound, Image and Place)
18/10/19 Huntly Express Magical evening of music and dancing
21/10/19 BBC Radio Scotland Janice Forsyth interviews Ela Orleans for The Afternoon Show
7/11/19 Huntly Express Film premiere hits a high note
7/11/19 Huntly Express Academics join walk and talk event
November 2019 Alchemy Film & Arts Movies for Ears: Ela Orleans by Michael website Pattison
8. Evaluation
Lunar Odyssey embarked on an ambitious journey: to capture and preserve the already-extinct or threatened cultural and ecological heritage of Huntly’s present and 20th century in an audio- visual time capsule which could communicate them 300 years into the future.
There are many problems associated with this aim, because we simply don’t and can’t know what the future will contain. Possible barriers to the aim of Lunar Odyssey being realised range from the cultural to technological to climate-related: The potential dissolution of our current language, musical structures, and cultural readings of visual associations may make Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes and the elements from which it is comprised incomprehensible. Will our current digital and hardware-based formats for media exist, and/or will someone take an archivist’s role in storing and updating them so that this work can be accessed? Will watching and listening be cultural activities acceptable to an audience in 300 years? Will the effects of the global climate crises mean that there is even an audience?
The fact that the project raises these questions in the first place has already had an influence on current cultural practitioners, for example the Visual Culture graduate Valerie Safira remarking on its recontextualisation of the field of creative soundscaping. Perhaps Lunar Odyssey’s impact will be written about by further academics and critical thinkers in the years to come.
The complex aims of Orleans’ multi-strand project also requires the survival of her original source of inspiration - the White Wood, Huntly’s living monument to peace. How we manage/maintain the evolving physical status, and the proliferation of awareness and understanding of both the wood and Orleans’ film across future generations will inform whether the works survive or not. The projects’ success depend in part on whether they fulfil the 300 year intention of their artists. As yet, there is much yet to be done, and it is far too early to tell.
9. Legacy
Local music and language
In Orleans’ work with local musicians and music students of The Gordon Schools, Lunar Odyssey raised the question of the survival and evolution of the traditional folk music of the north-east of Scotland. This in turn spurred conversations about the role of local language - Doric - in future culture and led to Deveron Projects working with local Doric speakers, the Elphinstone Institute, and Across the Grain festival (‘celebrating our unique Doric distinctiveness’) in its creative revival through events and language classes in 2018 and 2019.
Archive of Gordon McTavish
In the run-up to the premiere screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, an article was published in the Huntly Express which discussed Orleans’ dedication of the film to the memory of the late Gordon McTavish. Ela had met and spoken at length with Gordon - who was then in his eighties - during her 2018 residency in Huntly. A passionate cinematographer as well as serving as Huntly Cinema’s longest standing projectionist throughout much of the 20th century, Gordon had both shot and collected a vast volume of footage of events in the town, which he generously shared with Ela as someone who appreciated his passion and the value of his archive. Ela left Huntly having promised to invite Gordon to the screening of her final work from Lunar Odyssey, once it was complete.
Sadly Gordon McTavish passed away in January 2019. Having no contact with his relations, we were delighted when one of his family members got in touch with Deveron Projects in autumn 2019 in response to the Huntly Express article. Gordon’s daughter had all of Gordon’s film and photographic materials in storage, but no resources or plan for how to best preserve them. DP’s Art & Community Worker discussed possible collaborative paths which could lead to the materials being properly catalogued and cared-for in the formation of the Gordon McTavish Archive, allowing future access by the community. This conversation eventually passed to Bruce Murray, filmmaker and board member of Huntly and District Development Trust, who has continued to pursue this as part of plans towards a heritage and culture hub which would include a community cinema facility.
Town Collection artwork
After discussing several options, from a signposted route to the White Wood with immersive online soundtrack, and an artist’s multiple of limited edition CD/DVD, Orleans proposed that a triptych of film stills from Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes would best represent her project in the Town Collection. Stills would include some of the iconic images of young Huntly dancers in a mid-20th century pageant that had been used to promote the conference and screening events in autumn 2019. At the time of writing, they are close to being printed, framed and hung in the Jessiman Dance Studio - a family-run Huntly venue which has seen the instruction of the town’s young dancers since 1951.
Distribution and promotion of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes
In evaluating the impact and success of Lunar Odyssey, the future access and interpretation of the project’s audio-visual time capsule outcome will be essential. But how do we best pave the way? Do we allow limited access to Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes through a programme of screenings aimed at either embedding the work’s images and meanings in present day collective local consciousness? Do we create and attempt to promote free online access? In either case we must also attempt to look beyond the present, to future Huntly generations. This outlook assumes the continuance of current working models for creative social provision whose third sector position is based largely on public funding and therefore the economic and social circumstances which foster it. If Lunar Odyssey has taught us anything, it is to imagine a future beyond the assumptions of the present or the certainty of the past.
10. Funding and Thanks
Lunar Odyssey was an unusual project, in that the proposal and its associated artist’s residency funding came to us from Orleans’ research PhD with the University of Glasgow through the Scottish Graduate School for Arts and Humanities. We are grateful of this support from SGSAH.
The Sound, Image and Place conference and performance screening of Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes were staged with support from our core funders Aberdeenshire Council and Creative Scotland. Event marketing and promotion were supported in-kind by Sound Scotland and Across the Grain festivals.
11. Appendices
Appendix A – The evolution of a project proposal
Lunar Odyssey came out of a research proposal from the artist. The original proposal was to explore the timescales of Deveron Projects’ legacy work, Caroline Wendling’s The White Wood, planted in 2015 - a living artwork which referenced in pacifist’s terms back to the First World War, and forward 300 years to a time when the trees have matured and the artist’s intention will be fully realised.
Orleans originally planned to draw from ancient calendar systems, especially that of the Druidic Colligny Calendar, and overlay visualisations of calendar forms and an associated language of symbols onto the concentric circular planting of the White Wood. In this way the longest timescale of the White Wood (300 years) would be mirrored back into the past as well as forwards into the future. A language of ancient and therefore timeless symbols would be used as a possible future-proof way of communicating forwards to a time when arguably language may have changed so much from its present forms to be recognisable or understood. The aural heritage (natural and human) of the site and its nearby town of Huntly would also be explored within these past and future timescales.
Over time, and with further contact with the town of Huntly as she moved into her residency period, Orleans’ project proposal evolved to be most effectively communicated in the terms of the creation of an audio-visual time capsule. It would aim to capture the natural and human sights and sounds of Huntly’s twentieth century back to the First World War, and preserve them in a creative form for an uncertain future, as an appendix to add context and meaning to the White Wood in its future form.
Many forms were considered, including an experiential soundtrack, to accompany the pedestrian route to and from the White Wood from Huntly Train Station; and a symbol-based system of signage to and around the White Wood, drawing from Orleans’ research into archaic religious and communicational symbols. In the end, Orleans chose to work on her audio-visual time capsule through film and its soundtrack, with additional audio intended to be performed live for the film’s launch.
Oleans proposed to work with Deveron Projects during her PhD with the Glasgow School for Arts & Humanities. Her research focused around the best practice and ethical use of audience- generated and archive material in new artwork - this is something which would relate directly not only to her time gathering material while in residence in Huntly, but especially in her finished creative output, which necessitated a sensitive handling especially of the footage from and of the late Gordon McTavish.
Appendix B – Ela Orleans in Conversation with Petra Pennington
Renowned composer and Lunar Odyssey artist, Ela Orleans took time to talk to Petra Pennington about the project...
So, why Lunar Odyssey as a title?
Originally I was writing the audiovisual composition as a way of mapping the White Wood. It was supposed to be based on the Coligny calendar, made by the Druids who marked their territory with Oaks. It’s related to the movements of the moon and the stars, and associated with magical symbols.
After spending my days meeting people and gathering material, my main editing time was at night. This shaped my view on it, strengthening the lunar perspective. I decided that my final project will be black and white. The music and visuals will be juxtaposed with symbols, but I don’t want to over-intellectualise this - I think I got that from the community of artists here - there will be room for imagination. I want to make something reflective, dreamlike and peaceful, which is ultimately what I aimed for from the beginning, creating the work for the White Wood, a living monument to peace.
People typically imagine a composer working alone, being the one creative voice in the work. Here your project was shaped by so many voices. How did you find this highly social, collaborative way of working?
It’s quite different from everything I’ve done before, because for the first time I let the town and its sounds and people lead me rather than myself prompt the material. In my Gaelic project, Displaced and Adjusted, I was asking the singer to sing a particular type of song and in a particular style, wearing black during the performance and other details. But in Huntly I sunk into the texture of life here and I accepted it. I fell in love with that somehow.
Like the folk sessions at the Tin Hut in Gartly. I wouldn’t go to things like that in Glasgow - it’s not trying to be ambitious or artsy or impress anyone. It’s very genuine; it’s about having this kind of community that’s about fun and togetherness and not being lonely, really. And I met people who are elderly, people with autism, people going through some difficult times in life or illnesses. But all of them come together there. It’s very important, like a church almost. And the musicians of the Tin Hut Sessions were so generous to me.
At the beginning I was this person who just came and pushed myself into this community, this very gentle life, with my recorder and big headphones. I had to introduce myself and explain what I was trying to capture with my project, which kind of reaffirmed to me that what I was doing was important.
Having been aware of how many people you met to film, places you recorded, how many hours of sound did you end up with?
I think around 20 hours. And then there’s visual footage. For example I have lots of beautiful home-shot film from Gordon McTavish, who was Huntly’s projectionist from the age of 17. I thought meeting him may help me realise a more cinematic aspect of the town. Gordon was extremely generous and gave me insight into his career not only as a projectionist but as an amateur filmmaker, because he was always interested in filming things. That’s what happens to people who spend their lives watching movies. That’s what happened to me, except I went to school for that and he didn’t have that chance.
This work forms part of your PhD, would you be able to put Lunar Odyssey into that context for us?
My PhD is about investigating the moral rights in using archival images; how I can use film from official archives, family archives, old photos found in the charity shops - respectfully, without hurting anybody’s feelings.
In dealing with living artists during my time in Huntly, I always have to ask people if I can photograph, if I can film them, if I can use the song. I made detailed notes about every song, and was very diligent about that, so there is no random sampling. And I think this will help me to carry on my research in this very ethical way; more considerate even than I have been in the past.
Although I’m an artist, in this project I’m more like an archeologist. No, a documentarist; this was a study of life, of musical life, of musical texture of the area. I was looking for things I would otherwise probably not hear.
For example when I listened to the intricate music of the forest - the birdsong, the trees - I thought “Jesus Christ, this is just the most amazing music, ever.” There are no author rights for that, but I will orchestrate it, and write music to it. It will be surrounded by songs that are very of this place - by contemporary artists like Rachel Ashton, and a lot of traditional folk, where both artist and author will be attributed.
You spent hours collecting traditional music. As an archivist and composer you were looking back and also thinking forwards - what do you see as the next phase in the evolution of folk music?
I think to go forwards, it needs to look back actually. I think you need to bring more and more serious musicians here, to play and teach workshops, going back to the roots.
The texture of the sound is so original; it’s not invalid because it’s old. But it has been slightly forgotten. When I worked with the Gordon Schools, we asked kids to bring traditional songs, but their take on that was kind of oscillating around folk pop.
Folk music has the same problem, I think, that Country and Western has. When you go to Austin, you have pockets of real old folk music and that’s fantastic, that’s brilliant. And then you have this really horrible Western music which is a mélange of rock and pop just to bring more people.. I believe that having a smaller crowd of people who are genuinely interested is more valid and has a longevity to it that can be carried from generation to generation. I feel that these poppy ‘folk’ songs are the enemies of authentic folk, the original. We can have a copy of the Mona Lisa in our house but it’s nicer to go to the museum to see the real thing.
Ela is back in Glasgow, preparing to work on an epic film project drawing from 20,000 hours of official NASA footage from the moon landings. Her Lunar Odyssey film will be formally screened in Huntly as part of Lunar Odyssey conference: Explorations in time, space, sound and place in early 2019.
Appendix C - Deveron Express newsletter notices and articles about Lunar Odyssey and Sound, Image & Place conference
Article from Summer 2018 issue:
Ela Orleans comes to Huntly
As the early summer birdsong reached its zenith in the woods and gardens of Huntly, renowned electronic composer, Ela started her three month residency with Deveron Projects. Within her project Lunar Odyssey, Ela is capturing the threatened human and ecological music of Huntly and its White Wood, and preserving them for our future society. Collaborating with folk musicians, foresters, young and older folks, their recordings and archival material will form the basis for her multi-layered audio-visual time capsule.
Front cover article from Autumn 2018 issue:
/LOCAL LUNAR ODYSSEY In 300 years, what will our local language sound like? Will the same bird be heard, the same leaves rustling? Will there be a town? Will we be thriving or even surviving? How can we project our future in this, our uncertain world?
Sound artist Ela Orleans has been working to capture the sound of the past 100 years of our town and its trees, folks and hinterlands within the present-day framework of her electronic composition. Through the production of electronic music, video and a timeless language of symbols, Lunar Odyssey engages us with our increasingly alien past culture before it is lost, and asks us to consider how we preserve and develop it to survive the unknown journey of our future.
The artwork documents local Scots and Doric language tied to the people and land, a rich tapestry of folk music, and sounds of the ecology - all of which have been threatened as the twentieth century progressed into the present. Political, cultural and environmental factors have shaped the woods, farms, streets and meeting places of our great grandparents; the working sounds of their home, livelihood, and social life have been lost and replaced as change filtered through.
Like Huntly’s own Voyager Gold Record, Lunar Odyssey aims to preserve and project our aural culture forwards into the time and space of an uncertain future. As a sort of time capsule, the work contains sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture that existed and exists in our town, intended for future people or other life forms who may find it.
Taking our White Wood as a starting point – itself a living monument for peace that will not be fully realised for 300 years – Lunar Odyssey provides a platform for discussions, talks, walks and musical events with artists, anthropologists, historians and curators: to make the wealth of North East musical culture visible to the wider public.
The project connects with local musicians and composers, ballad singers and an extensive visual archive, contributing to our cultural place-making by connecting past with present and future, old with modern and new, and historic with contemporary and the unforeseen.
“You have to know the past to understand the present.” Carl Sagan
Notice/advert from Summer 2019 issue:
Notice/advert from Autumn 2019 issue:
Article from Winter 2020 edition:
Sound, Image & Place: sonic explorations of Huntly
How often do you examine the sounds that make up our sensory experience of a place? Do you analyse the frequencies of engine exhausts, the tempo of a dripping tap, or is it all just noise?
On 24 October, around forty academics, sound artists, and music students attended the Sound, Image & Place conference in Huntly, constructed around the Lunar Odyssey residency of Ela Orleans. A day we all were asked to really listen to our place. Professor Pete Stollery spoke of sound mapping. He played an audio clip and challenged us to name the source. Local volunteer Ingrid Wyllie without hesitation recognised it as not just any creaky door, but as the door to Huntly Library! No one knows Huntly’s features better!
Sound artist Maja Zećo added emotion and nostalgia to our understanding of locality. We later tuned our ears to this psycho-geographical soundscape in her led sound walk of Huntly, moving slowly through houses, woods, parkland and the industrial estate before returning through the bustle of The Square. Michael Pattison of Alchemy Film & Arts, contextualised the sounds and music of Ela Orleans within the framework of the conference’s themes, using humour to connect Ela’s work with the cinematic sounds of our childhoods.
The evening saw the world premiere of Ela Orleans’ Sylvan Ghosts / Viridian Echoes, which was filmed in Huntly in summer 2018 and features a shimmering mix of archival material, collected sounds, and interviews with local people with whom the artist worked. The influence of the late Gordon McTavish, Huntly Cinema’s projectionist, was felt throughout, with Ela dedicating the film to his memory.
Having suffered a dramatic break to her ankle, Ela braved pain to conduct local musicians as they performed an immersive blend of traditional folk tunes and incidental music in response to her film. Two Huntly-centric films by Dudendance Theatre were also shown to striking live soundtracks.
The event concluded the following morning with a strangely premised walk to the White Wood. Participants were asked to aurally ‘visualise’ the myriad layers of ecological and human sounds through time. We travelled back 300 years as well as forwards as into an unknown future soundscape, connecting people to place through their ears.
Appendix D - Poster, flyer and programmes from Sound, Image & Place conference High-res pdfs of main print items can be found at www.deveron-projects.com/lunar-odyssey.
Flyer – A5, front and back
Mini-flyer – for distribution at folk clubs and used as ¼ advert in Huntly Express
Event poster – A3 for venue doors – Full day conference and evening perfomance-screenings
Event programme – Full day – A5 folded, 4 sides
Event programme – Evening – A5 folded, 8 sides
Appendix E - Michael Pattison’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference
The text of this talk complete with embedded audio of the excerpts of Orleans’ work can be found at alchemyfilmandarts.org.uk/movies-for-ears-ela-orleans-deveron-projects.
MOVIES FOR EARS: THE WORK AND CONTEXT OF ELA ORLEANS
In April this year, writing for The List, David Pollock reviewed Movies for Ears, the new anthology of music recorded by Ela Orleans between 2001 and 2012. Pollock described the music heard on the album as ‘loveable and timeless, a nostalgic sonic environment which recreates classic sounds in a particularly off-kilter way, as though they’re being listened to with your head submerged or in an avant-garde cinematic flashback scene.’
An avant-garde cinematic flashback scene. It sounds evocative, cool, hip. It suggests something experimental, something outwith the mainstream on the one hand; and something akin to another world, prompted or triggered by lived experience, on the other hand. Though flashbacks can be literary, in this example the distinction is cinematic. What makes a sound, or a song, or a lyric, cinematic? What makes cinema a legitimate reference point for a music critic? In short, or in other words, how might a movie for ears sound and look?
Many cinematic reference points could help us understand Ela Orleans’ work. Though others are inevitably possible and no doubt equally valid, those mapped out here point to themes of memory and perception, to structure and duration, and to the automobile journey as a cinematic mode in itself.
Pollock, as if to immediately reinforce his cinematic hook, states that Orleans is a fan of Wenders, Cassavetes and late Godard. At some point in their career, these filmmakers – Wim Wenders, John Cassavetes and Jean-Luc Godard – made or have made contributions and homages to, and pastiches and recalibrations of, film noir. A genre notable for its dreamy qualities, the film noir also makes frequent use of the flashback. In noir, the flashback isn’t merely a delivery mechanism for a story so far. It very often is the story: a portal into pre-lived, re-lived and unlived experience. The flashback is promoted in noir from an occasional device to its own narrative system – occupying, not without fatalist irony, much of the film’s running time. The idea that the flashback grants access to a remembered or imagined world – embellished and filtered – is pertinent. Orleans herself has gone on record to remark, like many others, that movies in general provide a way of escaping reality. Films also, of course, constitute their own reality. Not only are films objective artefacts that exist in the world, they are also products of objective labour. Movies are their own kind of flashback, we might say, insofar as they are documents of their own production, or even documents of their own mode of production.
I think here of Richard Maltby, who argued that Bonnie & Clyde, a film made in 1967 Hollywood and set in 1933 Texas, inevitably tells us more about a film industry and counterculture coming to terms with newfound post-censorship freedoms than it ever could about the Great Depression. For similar reasons, I also think about a remark from James Benning, the American avant-garde film artist, who once answered a Sight & Sound poll searching for the best documentary ever made by naming James Cameron’s 1997 epic Titanic, citing it as ‘an amazing document of bad acting’.
I also think, in the context of an event exploring sensory understandings of locality, about the transportive capabilities of technology, and more specifically about the transportive qualities of watching a film projected from 16mm or 35mm. Such experiences, watching a film on film, have these days acquired an additional level of sensory joy. Flashback to 1992, when I saw the coming-of-age drama My Girl in a cinema – my first big screen experience, at the since- demolished Odeon on Newcastle’s Pilgrim Street – and when I was more mesmerised by the speckles, blemishes and cigarette burns that animated the image than I was by Dan Aykroyd’s big face.
Indeed, one benefit of digital projection these days is that, whenever one’s lucky enough to see a proper film – i.e., one that’s shown from a film print – the scarcity of the occasion imbues it with a renewed sense of awe: it’s as if the medium’s ‘wow’ factor, since its genesis in the 1890s and the eventual emergence of movie theatres, came in some way from how irreproducible each viewing experience was.
Experiences that resist or deny reproduction – the cinema visit, the music gig, the live performance – find ways nevertheless to secure their own legacy, morphing themselves into one’s mental tableau as images to be recalled, conjured, triggered. For Maureen Turim, ‘flashbacks give us images of memory, i.e., the personal archives of the past’, and ‘they also give us images of history, the shared and recorded past’. In other words, what Constance Balides, reviewing Turim’s Flashbacks in Film, distinguished as ‘memory as the messy tangle of past occurrences made meaningful through the disorder of unconscious logics, [and] history as ordered stories of the past, authorised by institutional procedures’.
Seen in this way, a musicianship and artistic practice such as that of Ela Orleans, with its layering of textures, samples, loops, repetitions, recalibrations and so on, evokes the character and function of the flashback.
Such an argument is about concept as much as it is technique. Collating songs recorded between eighteen years ago and seven years ago, Movies for Ears has a time-capsule quality embedded into its very concept: the album’s songs predate the here and now. Its subtitle, An Introduction to Ela Orleans, playfully riffs on the narrative codes of the flashback. The album is a re-release, a new sum of old parts, which reconfigures and lends renewed meaning to those parts.
I love how the opening track, ‘The Season’, begins in medias res: as if already in the middle of things, simultaneously late to the scene and at the height of action. This opening gets more and more powerful on each listen, for me, precisely because of the song’s repetition, its unceasing pulse: the simple loop, repeated over time, retroactively enforces what is known in film and television as the ‘cold open’ – the technique of jumping directly into a story prior to any credits. Speaking to Kirstyn Smith for the Skinny, Orleans has remarked that her remembrance of music during her early years is one involving technical malfunctions resulting in skipping records – errors that in their own way formed the basis of new interpretations of beloved songs. ‘I thought that was how the records were supposed to sound,’ Orleans says. ‘They just get stuck and there’s one little motif repeating itself over and over and over again.’
Orleans’ work makes a virtue of the little motif. It makes a point of repeating itself over and over and over again. Such repetition, over the course of several minutes, attunes the listener to its durational element so that the subtlest of shifts may be emphasised. At the 1 minute 54 second mark of ‘The Season’, for example, an entire new layer of percussion is introduced. If this introduction is belated, given that the overall length of the track is less than four minutes, we might also say it is startling – precisely because the durational repetition has induced a kind of anticipation for change in the listener, and because the new layer of sound must align itself to an otherwise unchanging motif, repeating itself over and over and over again, in such complementary fashion.
If music, broadly speaking, operates on a model of repetition plus variation, Orleans’ work exaggerates the maxim, establishing repetition so that the slightest variation is amplified. In this sense, her work is not unlike the structural film, a subset of avant-garde cinema that took the material limits of the film medium as legitimate points of formal and thematic inquiry. In the kind of structural film that I’m most interested in, duration and repetition combine in such a way as to affect and inform perception: they deploy the long, uninterrupted take – the single shot – whose durational element is emphasised further by a static, tripod-fixed frame. Crucially, they also minimise variables within the frame so as to draw attention to variations across time. In lingering on a single gaze, the uninterrupted take creates a kind of narrative expectancy. When, quote-unquote, ‘nothing happens’ – nothing, at least, in the traditional sense of action – the durational persistence of the image attunes us again to the finer details. These details might be blemishes on the film stock, or they might be a subtle change in light resulting from a drifting cloud. Perception is sharpened by repetition over time.
Flashback to March this year. ‘Something Higher’ – the fifth track on Movies for Ears – makes itself known to me through loop-based repetition. I was being driven – passive voice deliberate – to Tweedbank, a train station in the Scottish Borders. ‘Something Higher’ was playing in the car, on a playlist unfolding on shuffle mode, at a volume that was low enough to make the song itself indistinguishable but high enough so that I could feel and hear its pulse. Again, there’s the cold open – in medias res – and there’s the start-to-finish persistence that results in a kind of throb, a monotony that complements the droning hum of a car’s interior – or, to borrow David Pollock’s phrase in describing Ela Orleans’ work, its ‘sonic environment’.
Car journeys embody their own forms of repetition and duration. As a sensory experience that allows us to literally navigate multiple localities, the car journey also satisfies Yi Chen’s description of the structural film as ‘a cultural practice that exemplifies phenomenology as a method of investigating lived life’. Indeed, automobiles provide their own structural cinema, with the windscreen as a fixed framing device, a window into a world of monotonous repetition that nevertheless demands constant attention. Over time – and indeed space – an aggregate experience of a journey makes itself known: through duration, repetition, perception.
The gradual picture of a journey, underpinned and informed by variations across time – variations in landscape, locality, one’s posture and comfort – is understood only retroactively. Though the road enables forward passage, the journey itself prompts an almost constant sense of recall, memory, flashback. To put this another way, the very moment one realises how far one has come is the same moment one realises one cannot relive, recover or return to an earlier point en route.
Such a discovery must always reveal the fictional basis of the flashback. As Henri Lefebvre writes in Rhythmanalysis, ‘Absolute repetition is only a fiction of logical and mathematical thought.’ In the equation A = A, Lefebvre points out, the second A differs from the first by fact that it is second; the very act of re-living an experience is coloured by that experience, which cannot be unlearned.
No surprises, here, that the three filmmakers cited earlier in reference to film noir – Wim Wenders, John Cassavetes and Jean-Luc Godard – also made road movies, perhaps most successfully in the case of Wenders, a German filmmaker whose 1969 short 3 American LPs documents road-movie iconographies captured from a car travelling through West Berlin. Perhaps it’s no coincidence, likewise, that Kirstyn Smith describes Ela Orleans’ ‘Light at Dawn’ as ‘a dreamy Lynchian romance that could at any moment turn into a nightmare, reminiscent of barrooms and billiards.’ The description is another way of positioning Orleans’ work cinematically, referencing David Lynch, whose noirs are also often road movies, leveraging flashbacks, faulty tech including skipping records, and the monotony of car travel for maximum, transportive power.
As someone who was driven 215 miles [from Hawick to Huntly] this morning to be here, I’d like to propose the car journey – and preferably the longer-than-average car journey – as the optimum context in which to experience and understand Movies for Ears. The car’s forward motion, its physical movement through the z-axis, harks back to the early days of cinema: the ‘wow factor’ of the phantom ride, a genre that simply documented life from the front of a moving vehicle. As a ‘sonic environment’ itself, the car is also its own ‘avant-garde cinema’, a window onto scene after scene after scene – the little motifs to which Ela Orleans alludes – which form a single uninterrupted sequence that repeats itself over and over and over again.
What happens? Nothing and everything. As Amanda Yates writes, in reference to the ostensibly action-free gaze of structural films by Titanic fan James Benning: ‘Be patient. Pay attention. The story is already there. Here it comes.’
CITED Chen, Yi (2016). Practising Rhythmanalysis. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Balides, Constance (1991). ‘Review: Flashbacks in Film.’ Screen 32:1. Benning, James (2012). ‘The Greatest Documentaries of All Time.’ Sight & Sound. Maltby, Richard (2003). Hollywood Cinema. Oxford: Blackwell. Lefebvre, Henri (2013). Rhythmanalysis. London: Bloomsbury. Pollock, David (2019). ‘Ela Orleans: ‘Sometimes the most primitive idea is the best.’ The List. Smith, Kirstyn (2019). ‘Ela Orleans introduces Movies for Ears.’ The Skinny. Turim, Maureen (1989). Flashbacks in Film: Memory and History. New York: Routledge. Yates, Amanda (2008). ‘Looking and Listening.’ James Benning. Eds. Barbara Pichler and Claudia Slanar. Vienna: FilmmuseumSynemaPublikationen.
Appendix F - Prof Pete Stollery’s talk from Sound, Image & Place conference
Listening to Place
Places provide the ontological ground on which we stand and live our lives. The fact that we need a place to live, and not a space, shows that places are essential to our existence. Each place sets itself as a unique and special background to which all things in our life unfold.
Places can also haunt us. They are a main source of nostalgia, a pain we experience when we are, literally, out of place. We want to fit into new, strange or unfamiliar places or get out of old, typical or habitual places. We force ourselves or we are forced into a relationship with place.
We therefore have a desire to understand this relationship between ourselves and place, and, whilst trying to understand it, we have told stories, drawn paintings, and taken pictures. Thanks to the development of sound recording technology, we now can record sounds in one place and play them back in another, thus granting us new possibilities of understanding our relationship with place through sound.
At the same time, however, this technology fundamentally changes the nature of sounds we hear. As Suk-Jun Kim states: ‘[…] sounds in recorded media are both disembodied - sounds have, literally, been robbed of their body by the act of recording and playing them back - and dis-placed - the very act of recording sounds offers the opportunity to present (recorded) sound in a different place, thereby unplacing it.’ (Kim, 2010) These acts of recording and of listening to sounds in a place - disembodiment and displacement - offers us various ways of engaging with place.
But our listening to place through recorded sound is actually quite precarious: no matter what technology we use – old and new - it ends up explaining only partially our engagement with place because, as Heidegger has identified, the essence of technology is to enframe and, consequently, it conceals as much as it reveals. This enframing nature of technology is most vividly witnessed in the practices of acousmatic listening and acousmatic composition, where audio technology not only provides us with new possibilities of understanding our relationship with place but forces us to observe the glaring absence of it - that is, we are not in the place where this sound recording was made. Thus, through recorded sound, our relationship with place becomes less about how effectively the recorded sound presents - or re-presents - the place, than about what (and how) the technology reveals and conceals from our layers of place experience.
In my own work as a composer and sound artist, an engagement with place has featured in both poietic (composer intention) and esthesic (listener reception) contexts. In 1998, I was commissioned by BBC Radio Scotland to make a five-minute piece using sounds recorded in Aberdeen. At that time, I had been living and working in Aberdeen for seven years and so I was gradually moving from the role of sonic tourist to sonic resident, having experienced the soundscape of Aberdeen over that time. [ABZ/A] The title of the piece takes the acronym ABZ (the airport identification code for Aberdeen) with A being the maritime equivalent - two aspects of Aberdeen I wanted to capture in sound. The piece includes a certain amount of untreated or minimally treated field recordings, where recognition associated with place was important.
Here is an example of this from the opening moments of the piece: [PLAY ABZ/A EXAMPLE] – 0’ 30” This minimally treated passage has the potential to be experienced on a number of levels; some possible triggers on hearing the pedestrian crossing signal at the start of the extract are: • a resident of or regular visitor to Aberdeen might be ‘taken’ to the actual place - on Schoolhill, between the St Nicholas and Bon Accord Shopping Centres); • a resident of or regular visitor to the UK might imagine a similar environment, based on their aural experience of such a place; • others might imagine some kind of alarm or warning signal; • others with little or no experience of contemporary urban environments would imagine something completely different. What is important for me here is the idea of multiple levels of association. It is not important that the listener ‘goes’ to the exact place of the recording, but that they ‘go’ to a place. The esthesic response of the listener allows them to determine the place, based on their own experience and, of course, through discussion, whether in my own teaching or during post-performance conversations, these differing experiences can lead to some very interesting interpretations.
Another example might be this: [PLAY BRANDER LIBRARY DOOR ] – 0’ 15” [QUICK CHAT about recognition of door] – 1’
In his seminal work, The Tuning of the World: The Soundscape, published in 1977, R. Murray Schafer talks about how the soundscape experienced by most of us, that of the city, has inevitably created a sense of nostalgia for other sounds, particularly sounds that we have lost, whether through neglect or through human development.
Schafer proposes the notion of Museums of Disappearing Sounds: At the age of forty I have many memories […] which are no longer to be heard (milk bottles, steam whistles, bicycle bells, horseshoes being tossed against a metal spike). Everyone will have such a list. We listen back […] and notice how much has slipped away unperceived. […] Where are the museums for disappearing sounds? Even the most ordinary sounds will be affectionately remembered after they disappear. Their very ordinariness turns them into exceptional sound souvenirs. (Schafer, 1977) I suggest that, towards the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century, these museums are becoming ubiquitous, curated through recording and subsequent presentation via multiple formats, including works for concert performance such as ABZ/A, sound installations and, in particular, internet-based sound maps.
At the same time, we are witnessing a growing interest in sound itself as a starting point for discussions in a variety of community groupings. Two projects of mine take this idea of developing community-driven sound conversations relating to place as their starting point:
• Aberdeen soundsites; a community-driven sound map; • Hilton Soundscape; a sound romance and sonic archaeology project.
Aberdeen soundsites was created to help those engaging with it to understand more about the power of listening in everyday life and to raise awareness of the many sounds that surround and which are often ignored.
Using a sound mapping tool created within the Google Earth environment, users can upload sounds onto the sound map. As more sounds are added the project develops into a rich database of the soundscape of Aberdeen – providing the audio heritage for the future.
[GUIDED TOUR - Pitoddrie/Art Gallery – social media/sound conversations] – 2’
In the past two years, Aberdeen soundsites has been ported over to the iOS app [M]apping Aberdeen, which allows for a more spontaneous reaction to sound which can be recorded and uploaded to the map, exactly like a photograph to a social media site and which also updates the main Google Earth site.
A second aspect of both ABZ/A and Aberdeen soundsites , which somewhat counters Schafer’s idea of nostalgia for sounds away from the city, is that they actively address our relationship with urban sounds.
In From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory, composer James Tenney recalls his journey to work at the Bell Labs in New York, via the heavily congested Route 22 and the Holland Tunnel as “an exhausting, nerve-wracking experience: fast, furious and noisy”.
The sounds of the traffic—especially in the tunnel— were usually so loud and continuous that ‘[…] it was impossible to maintain a conversation with a companion. […] One day I found myself listening to these sounds instead of trying to ignore them as usual. […] When I did, finally, begin to listen, the sounds of the traffic became so interesting that the trip was no longer a thing to be dreaded and gotten through as quickly as possible. From then on, I actually looked forward to it as a source of new perceptual insights.’ (Tenney, 2015)
Through a deeper and more musical listening attitude, Tenney was able to identify and isolate individual sonic elements from the monolithic totality of noise – an activity perhaps no more demanding than the attempts listeners make to decode the landscape of a Bach four-part fugue or Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring.
[Hilton Soundscape]
The second project I want to present is the Hilton Soundscape. In August 2003, the School of Education at the University of Aberdeen, where I worked at the time, relocated from its Hilton campus to the refurbished MacRobert Building on the King’s College campus. Shortly before the move, I emailed members of staff to ask if there were any sounds (both loved and not so loved), that they would like me to preserve through the act of recording before the buildings on the campus were pulled down.
With this project, I wanted to create what Schafer refers to as a sound romance – that is:
‘…any past or disappearing sound remembered nostalgically, particularly when idealised or otherwise given special importance.’ (Schafer, 1977)
Many such sounds are often ignored in normal everyday circumstances, but when recorded and subsequently re-heard, this can trigger a strong sense of nostalgia.
Clicking on the pins on the map allows you to listen to the sounds and re-imagine, through memory, the locations they once belonged to.
[GUIDED TOUR – Historical Imagery - Oystercatchers/Door handle] – 2’
The next stage of the project, 15 years later, is to record new sounds, as near as possible to the location of the originals and to place them on the map under red pins, providing a kind of sonic archaeology, with sounds from different time periods, the location serving different purposes. In the future, this housing development may need to make way for a new road, or a large out of town shopping mall, in which case, a new layer of sound can be added.
One particular community, certainly in the UK, for whom an engagement with sound is becoming increasingly important is schoolchildren.
Let me play you a short extract from a piece of music.
[PLAY LIGHTYEAR ] – 1’ 30”’
That was the first ninety seconds of the piece Lightyear from 1994, composed by a group of nine-year olds from the Isle of Dogs on the banks of the River Thames. The brief was to create a piece of music to accompany the celebrations for the 1995 New Year. Two composers worked with the pupils and their teachers, gathering sounds from their local environment and working with them over a period of a month to create the piece. It’s inevitable that the vast majority of the sounds were connected with the River Thames with the Isle of Dogs being formed by one of the largest meanders of the river in the city, encasing it on three sides. These sounds were chosen by the schoolchildren when they were asked what the Isle of Dogs sounded like to them – boat bells, horns and engines. The performance was broadcast live on Capital Radio at 2 minutes to midnight and accompanied by a light show created by the artist Peter York, which was projected onto the Canary Wharf tower – an empowering creative experience for young people in a part of London where opportunities such as this were not frequent.
Lightyear was the result of a project produced by Sonic Arts Network, the lead UK organisation at the time devoted to the promotion of sonic art and electroacoustic music. Sonic Postcards, another project devised by Sonic Arts Network, developed out of projects such as Lightyear, allowing pupils from across the UK to explore and compare their local sonic environments, through recording, composing and ultimately sharing their sonic postcards with other schools. The project was initially set up throughout schools in England but was successfully brought to Aberdeenshire, supported by Youth Music Initiative funding in the early-mid 2000s, with schools across the shire taking part, including Huntly Primary School.
Aimed at the 9-14 age group, the project focuses on the impact of sound on our lives and demonstrates the possibilities for creativity through the manipulation of sound with technology. As with an ordinary postcard it offers the opportunity for people to exchange information about their local environments, providing windows into a variety of places, lives and cultures in rural, urban and coastal locations. Legacy is an important aspect of the project and skilled animateurs work not only with pupils, but also with teachers, in order that similar work may be continued after the initial project is complete.
Part of the success of Sonic Postcards comes from its ability to provide meaningful creative musical experiences for young people who don’t have traditional practical or musical literacy skills, whilst also facilitating inclusive routes into music education and positive responses for difficult and challenging pupils. It allows for a wider learning experience, through sound, as opposed to only music and for pupils to improvise with materials they are familiar with on one level (hearing, oblique awareness) but unfamiliar on another (creative, responsive). In his book Silence, John Cage refers to this as “purposeless play”; composers of acousmatic music might make comparisons with Guy Reibel’s notion of “séquence-jeu”, where the composer records the process of working with a sounding body, performing an improvisation in order to release its sonic potential, prior to subsequent selection and/or rejection.
Another example of the project’s success can be exemplified anecdotally. When a school based on the north coast of Cornwall shared their sonic postcard with a school from Slough, the Slough pupils commented on the sound of the sea in the background of their piece. The pupils from Cornwall also commented on the distant sound of the sea in the background of the Slough piece – Slough is, of course, over 70 miles away from the nearest coast. Following much discussion, the “sea” in the Slough piece was eventually identified as the background noise from the M4 motorway.
What is clear from all of these projects is that when communities engage closer with the sounds of places, this can lead to deeper and richer life experiences. The conversations which can grow from these experiences can help to inform a greater awareness of everyday sound and how it relates to place and to develop listening skills, something which his becoming more and more essential in the rapidly increasing ocularcentric nature of the world we live in.
Appendix G - Maja Zeco’s provocation card from her Sound Walk of Huntly at Sound, Image & Place conference
Appendix H - Abby Beatrice Quick’s photographs from Sound, Image & Place conference