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• 1 2016-08-13T19:14:20-07:00 Chapter Two: The Mediating Role of Technology 7 plain 2016-09-13T09:38:05-07:00 The Uses of Technology in Soundscape Composition
  We’ve established that soundscape composition is a type of music that uses technology to capture real-world environmental sounds and aims to instill in the listener a sense of place and connection. As illustrated in the table below, this can be done in several ways, each of which comes with their own implications and challenges. Let’s go through each of these composition types, with specific attention towards how each repurposes scientific technology to achieve artistic ends.
   
  1. Field Recording Compositions
  The prototypical soundscape composition is a musical piece intended for playback that incorporates actual recorded sound from natural or urban environments. These recordings are most often by the composer themselves. A composer can choose to later process the recorded sounds in the studio, fragmenting elements from the recording, combining recordings from different locations, manipulating the recorded sounds, and so on. The technological tools required for field recording compositions are, at the most basic level, a recorder and microphone. Both these tools possess rich histories in both scientific and musical contexts.
   
   The advent of the microphone in the 20^th century, for instance, has changed how we produce and receive music. In the context of singing styles, we can observe a transition between the full, powerful style of Bessie Smith to the microphone’s era of “intimate” vocal technique – the more whispering, subtle, confidential approach taken by singers such as Billie Holiday and Frank Sinatra. Kim-Cohen describes how in band recording processes, the “microphone’s expanded dynamic field closes down the sense of perceived space.” When each instrument has its own microphone, it occupies its own dimension, the “sense of a collective space of performance is lost,” but a new feel of intimacy is also created.[1] The idea that the microphone is a non-neutral interface that influences how we record and perceive sound is a major theme in soundscape composition, pointing to the idea that our relationship to nature is always colored by the subjectivity of our own perspective.
   
  In soundscape composition, the microphone becomes a type of musical instrument in itself. Similar to a camera lens or microscope, a microphone can be used to “enhance or distort one’s perception of specific parts of our sensory environment.”[2] In this sense, it acts as a framing device – with it, the recordist decides where the soundscape will begin and end. Even if they do not alter the recording any further, this decision in itself places a mark of subjectivity upon the recorded soundscape. Francisco López suggests that even before the recording itself, the choice of microphone makes a difference, as he points out that microphones “hear” in very different ways depending on model.[3] In his thesis “Acoustic illuminations: recorded space as soundscape composition,” Reuben Derrick suggests that the microphone changes our perception of the soundscape by switching our mode of listening. As Derrick describes, “Sounds which might have been the focus of background listening or listening in readiness can then become the focus of foreground listening; thus the soundscape’s ecology is temporarily re-configured.”[4]  In this “reconfigured” soundscape, the recordist’s own curiosity becomes heightened and encourages them to venture into territory they would not otherwise consider exploring. Westerkamp notes that the physical/visible presence of the microphone itself affects whether this exploration is possible. With a microphone, a recorder may gain new access to an environment by legitimizing one’s presence in certain places or empowering one to enter normally inaccessible places, or on the other hand, it may also block access when it is seen as a security threat or an invasion of privacy.2 With this in mind, the microphone places the recordist in a position of participant-observation akin to the ethnographer or ethnomusicologist, a concept we will examine further in the upcoming section.
   
  Hildegard Westerkamp expands upon the idea of microphone-as-musical instrument in her essay “Linking Soundscape Composition and Acoustic Ecology.”  Westerkamp points out that our human ears are selective. When we listen without a microphone, we have the ability to focus in and out of certain elements in the foreground and background of what we can hear. A microphone, however, is non-selective, and will pick up all sounds equally. Therefore, what the microphone picks up is often very different from what the ear perceives. Westerkamp plays with this discrepancy in her field recording piece Kits Beach Soundwalk (1989). At the beginning of the piece, the listener is placed on Kits Beach in Vancouver. They hear waves lapping and birds in the foreground, and a lower roar of city traffic in the background. At 1:42, Westerkamp says into the recording “I could shock or fool you by saying that the soundscape is this loud” – she proceeds to increase the levels of the beach sounds – “but it is more like this” – she lowers the levels again.[5] Suddenly, the listener is aware that what they will be hearing throughout this piece won’t necessarily be the “truth.” The sounds they will be hearing are a cross between physical reality and Westerkamp’s interpretation and imagination. Bernie Krause, himself a professional field recorder, describes this split as an exposure of “the gulf between our inner and outer worlds.”[6] In reference to anthropologist Gregory Bateson’s statement, “the map is not the territory,” the recording of a wild soundscape is not a perfect representation of what we think we’re hearing, as our acoustic impressions are often influenced by the other senses, proximity (i.e., foreground vs. background) of the sounds we hear.[7]
   
  Soundscape ecology similarly recognizes the role that perception and proximity places in out conception of the soundscape. We can trace back its use of the microphone, however, the field of ornithology (the study of birds). For ornithologists of the early to mid-20^th century, recording birdsong was primarily a process of extracting the sound out of the context of the natural environment for study in isolation. Recording equipment such as the parabolic microphone reflected the sound waves of birdsong so they were selectively directed right into the focal point of the microphone, minimizing input of background noise.[8] In fact, ornithologists preferred to ignore background sounds altogether in their studies - “sterilizing” field sound through techniques as explicit as tweaking recordings and whiting out evidence of noise on spectrograms.5 Birdsong, not the soundscape, was their primary objective for study. That being said, the aims of these ornithologists could be said to align more with the field of bioacoustics rather than soundscape ecology. While bioacoustics is closely related to soundscape ecology in that it also studies the sounds made by organisms, it focuses on behavioral and physical aspects of animal communication limited to individual species or comparisons between species rather than "the acoustics of entire communities, the environment and the relationship of sounds to ecological processes.”6 Soundscape ecologists of today, such as Bernie Krause, stress the importance of capturing the soundscape in its complete context, as a complex “collection of biological, geophysical and anthropogenic sounds that emanate from a landscape and which vary over space and time reflecting important ecosystem processes and human activities.”2 Krause stresses that biophony (sound produced by non-human living organisms), geophony (abiotic sounds), and anthropophony (human-produced sounds) cannot be conveniently organized or isolated. Rather, all these sound sources together form a web of interrelationships and impacts.
   
  Soundscape composers also emphasize the importance of valuing the soundscape’s complexity through its use of the microphone to move between and explore all aspects of the soundscape. One example of this concept in action is David Dunn’s work entitled Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond (1992). Chaos consists of a collage of aquatic insect recordings from ponds throughout North America and Africa. Using two omnidirectional ceramic hydrophones and a portable DAT recorder, Dunn captured surround-sound settings of activities occurring in the ponds. Dunn’s collage attempts to illustrate the rhythmic complexity he heard in these ponds, “a rhythmic complexity altogether greater than that in most human music.” Out of this “chaos,” the pond becomes “a kind of superorganism, a transcendent social ‘mind’” that calls to mind the seemingly unified intelligence of eusocial insect colonies.[9] Chaos represents a manifestation of soundscape composition’s interest in the holistic interactions and relations of the environment. Because Dunn fuses together field recordings from drastically different ecologies, Chaos is not a representational document that freezes time “in order to study, intensify experience, or cherish the past.” Nor is it merely an audio portrait of a place that does not exist. Rather, Dunn describes Chaos and other pieces of this type as strategies for listening, pieces that allow a listener to evolve “an intrinsic relationship to a subject.” Anthropologist Hugh Raffles describes Dunn’s work as more than recording or composition, “…is also a research method, one that flows easily from a principle of wholeness.” Through the interface of the microphone, what Dunn and his colleagues seems to be researching is the formation of a new human relationship to nature. This relationship is not based on a human-centric, romanticized vision of a balanced nature, but on a method of active participation with nature as it is.
   
  2. Sonification and Audification
   
  If there is any technique that better captures nature “as it is” than field recording, it would be sonification. Simply stated, a sonification is a process that maps data into sound. The term itself generally refers to its use as a scientific method of data display. Kramer, who helped form the annually meeting International Community for Auditory Display (ICAD) in 1994, defines sonification as “the use of nonspeech audio to convey information. More specifically, sonification is the transformation of data relations into perceived relations in an acoustic signal for the purposes of facilitating communication or interpretation.” A variety of data can be sonified, from seismographic data, election results, molecular structures, to the electrical activity of the brain.1 Audification, a subset of sonification, is simply the conversion of a previously inaudible signal into a sound signal whose meaning can be inferred by the listening.1 For example, the seismographic waves of an earthquake are below the frequency range of human hearing, but by increasing playback speed of these waves, they can become audible to the human ear.4
   
  Sonification as an artistic medium, however, has existed before the scientific understanding of the term. Practices akin to sonification can be observed in the  conceptual art movements of the 1960s, through the work of composers such as John Cage, Alvin Lucier, Charles Dodge, and installation artists including Hans Haacke, Sol Lewitt, Dan Graham. These artists were similarly concerned using raw material such as sound as a basis for their art, and their works, similar to Rilke’s vision, presented natural processes and phenomena that surpassed the limits of individual self-expression and personal vision.3,4 In his Atlas Eclipticalis, for example, John Cage superimposed music paper on top of star charts and plotted musical compositions as though they were constellations. Cage’s techniques of chance and indeterminacy, through the lens of sonification, were a way of letting nature speak for itself, in the process “dismantling of the romantic notion of the artistic genius.”[10]
   
  The type of sonification relevant to studies of the soundscape is what Polli has termed as “geosonification,” or the transformation data from natural environments into sound.[11] Notably, sonification as a formal practice was originally conceived under scientific terms, as an alternative method for presenting datasets for scientists with visual impairments or as “a complement to existing modes of representation, [to] yield a more thorough comprehension of certain scientific data and phenomenon.”[12] One example of soundscape composition that incorporates geosonification techniques is John Luther Adams’s The Place Where You Go to Listen (2006). The Place, a permanent gallery exhibit located at University of Alaska’s Museum of the North, converts real-time streams of solar and lunar cycles, weather, seismographic, and geomagnetic data from stations located throughout Alaska and converts them into sound and color.  Adams notes that while the music of The Place is produced by natural phenomena, it “is not a scientific demonstration.”[13] Subjective, artistic choices were made in the designing of the computer program for The Place, for the sounds that would represent the changes in each type of natural process. Furthermore, Adams asserts how all these choices are filtered through the interpretation of the listener:  “The essence of this work is the sounding of natural forces interacting with the consciousness of the listener.” For Adams, this does not make The Place any less “authentic” or “truthful.” “The Place,” Adams asserts, “is not a simulated experience of the natural world. It is a heightened form of experience itself.”[14]
   
  Nevertheless, the way in which Adams essentially repurposes sonification to fulfill artistic intentions in The Place is a notion that many sonification practitioners are uneasy with, especially in the context of their attempts to establish sonification as a legitimate scientific discipline. Fighting against the bias of a predominantly visual culture, scholar Alexandra Supper notes that sonification already represents a type of “breaching experiment,” violating established customs of scientific data display and calling into question cultural norms on what constitutes an acceptable way of representing scientific data.[15] As a result, newer definitions of sonification attempt to emphasize the field's objective distinctiveness from art. At the 2008 ICAD conference, for example, Hermann proposed a new definition of sonification as not simply a means of translation but  “a technique that uses data as input, and generates sound signals” that can only be termed sonification if the data reflects objective relations, is a systematic translation, is reproducible, and whose procedure can be applicable to different data. Supper observes that with this new definition, “we are witnessing the establishment of a set of procedures to reduce subjective intervention in an appeal to ‘mechanical objectivity.’”[15]
   
  The use of sonification in soundscape composition, however, demonstrates that due to its inherently translational nature, sonification must appeal to some degree of subjectivity in order to function. Hermann and Grond observe that “sonification is the acoustic representation of data. Ultimately, it is just sound. Therefore, we can only hear a sound as sonification, if we make sure to listen attentively in order to access the abstract information it contains.”[16] This notion is strikingly similar to the emphasis in soundscape composition that interpretation ultimately depends on the subjective agency of the listener. Thus, in both scientific sonification and soundscape composition, the role of the listener appears to be key. Furthermore, as sound artist Andrea Polli observes, the numerical data used to construct a sonification is itself a type of simplification, "as it is impossible to collect discrete data on every process that happens in a continuous environment.” She goes on to note that just as with the microphone, humans must make choices "about when, where, and what to record [sonify], from microphone placement to post- processing.”[17] Therefore, one could argue that rather than strive for objectivity, sonification practitioners can also achieve legitimacy by engaging in what Supper calls “boundary work.” By engaging in negotiations at the boundaries of their field, sonification can establish its own cultural authority and set itself apart from other endeavors as a unique “hybridization of the empirical and expressive.”[18]
   
  One example of such a hybridization is Polli’s Heat and the Heartbeat of the City (2004), a project that documents the effects of climate change on New York City’s Central Park through a combination of video interviews and sonification. Using records and model predictions, Central Park's maximum daily summer temperatures from 1990 to 2080 are “translated into pitch, loudness, and the speed of sounds,” as well as changing visual background colors. The piece is broken up into four approximately seven-minute time periods - the 1990’s, 2020’s, 2050’s, and 2080’s. As the piece guides the listener through each period, they not only can objectively detect rising temperatures, but also experience a growing feeling of ominous uneasiness that comes with the shifting timbres and intensity of the sound.[19] By placing this effect in a familiar location (Central Park, as opposed to the notion of distant melting glacier), combined with the narratives provided by the interviews, Heat and the Heartbeat of the City places the listener in a position of both empirical and emotional alarm and relevancy. Heat and the Heartbeat of the City shows how soundscape compositions can emerge out of Supper’s “boundary work” as types of “artistic” sonifications - projects that translate data into sound to communicate meanings less quantifiable and more metaphoric. These meanings ultimately pose more questions than answers, calling listeners to engage and decipher the natural sounds being presented in order to acquire new perspectives and relationships with the environment.
   
  One of the earliest forays into this type of data music is often attributed to poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who in 1919 wondered what it would sound like to acoustically reproduce coronal sutures along the human skull.[20] The Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy expressed a similar interest in the sounds of the visual in 1923 with his proposition of playing back graphic signs cut into gramophone disks.[21] Central to these early explorations that has carried on to artistic sonifications today is a curiosity in what could be revealed in the act transferring data destined for one sense, to another. Kim-Cohen attributes this curiosity to the dream of the idealized “unified sensory experience.”[22] Such an experience stems from the philsophical belief that there is a completeness in nature, but as humans the “inadequate perceptual faculties” of our five senses leaves us with an incomplete experience.2 Methods like sonification allow one to bridge, as Rilke describes “the abysses which divide the one order of sense experience from the other” and unify the five senses into a holistic, immersive consciousness that allows an “ever more active and more spiritual capacity.”[23] For Rilke, sonifications can give us a type of data that allows the artist and listener to surpass their own limitations.
   
   
  3. Soundwalking
   
              Our third major type of soundscape composition is the soundwalk. In a soundwalk, the composer moves through their chosen environment, listening and recording the sounds they hear along the way. The composer might invite participants to take part in the experience of the soundwalk, and may or may not incorporate their own vocal observations and reflections into the recording. Organized throughout the world, today’s soundwalks often take shape as public events that emphasize awareness and engagement with the environment, usually an urban city location. The soundwalk emphasizes the embodied nature of listening on the human scale. In a soundwalk, compositional techniques become the physical movements the recordist’s body – as they walk, stop, turn around, or change their pace, the perspective of the soundscape shifts.[24]
   
  The idea of the soundwalk has a long and rich history spanning across the fields of literature, philosophy, and art. Thoreau revered “the art of walking” as a method of inquiry and introspective reflection. The flâneur, a figure found in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin, among others, is something of a soundwalker, a detached “observer of the marketplace” who “feeds on the sensory data taking shape before his eyes” and experiences an unfolding image of his surroundings that both encompasses the present and speaks through “the loaded past of memories, histories, and history.”[25] In mid 20th century psychogeography and French situationist theory, the derive could be seen a another, more political predecessor of the soundwalk, in which a person drops all their usual work/life obligations and motives and wanders on an unplanned journey across the urban landscape, drawn by chance attractions and encounters discovered along the way.[26] What these modes of walking seem to have in common and walk soundwalking draws from is a intimate, sensory-based connection to the landscape as a means of gaining insight.
   
  A second main thread from which soundwalking has emerged from is the concept of walks as a source of qualitative data for research purposes. In the field of urban acoustics, for example, Jean-Paul Thibaud (2001) developed a method using commented walks to complement metrological surveying techniques, with researchers recording the experience and perceptions a participant describes as they move through a space.[27] Hildegard Westerkamp’s soundwalk works originated as a qualitative complement to research taking place in the World Soundscape Project. Westerkamp’s experimental “Soundwalking” radio series, for example, blended soundscape documentary, commentary, and debate on social issues around noise with musical imagery that was based on recorded soundscape material.[28] Later, Westerkamp produced several formal soundwalk compositions, including the aforementioned Kits Beach Soundwalk, which, like Dunn’s Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond, have evolved to become more of a creative transformation or recomposition than a mode of research.
   
  One example of a soundwalk that also incorporates audification is Christina Kubisch’s Electrical Walks, a series of projects which began in 2003. In these collaborative projects, Kubisch guides participants through city streets wearing specially-designed headphones that “amplify electromagnetic fields into the range of human hearing.”[29] Interesting, unexpected sounds arise from just about anywhere and anything that uses electricity - from lighting and wireless networks to antitheft security devices and cell phones.[30] Even more so than other forms of soundscape composition, the participant in a soundwalk holds a large degree of agency in determining the outcome of the composition they hear. Following Kubisch’s prescribed route is only optional, and by adjusting their proximity and position relative to objects, the participant can alter the timbres, intensities, and rhythms they hear, a freedom that Polli describes as “an opportunity to reestablish an ecological link with the source of information.”[31]From this new link, Kubisch emphasizes a discovery of music in what might normally be cast off as meaningless noise. She describes the electromagnetic sounds revealed as “complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, long drones and many things which change constantly and are hard to describe,” intricate worlds that demand attention and investigation.[32] Kim-Cohen notes that by providing participants with these new, intricate worlds, Kubisch’s role becomes one typically assigned to a scientist rather than an artist, as an agent alerting the participant of “previously undisclosed facts.”[33]  However, like Polli in her Heat and the Heartbeat of the City, Kubisch aims to impact her audience in a way that moves beyond merely presenting quantitative information. Instead, Kubisch has stated through Electrical Walks an aims to emphasize the shift in our perception of everyday reality that comes when one listens to a familiar environment through the unfamiliar context of the electromagnetic spectrum.¹ Again, the expansion of perspective through the medium of technology arises as a key theme.
   
  4. In situ Performance Works
   
  Like those in the Land Art movement before them, some soundscape composers leave the concert hall or gallery entirely, places sound, an object, or a performance situation directly into an environment. In contrast to soundwalks, these in situ compositions are often carried out in non-urban “natural” settings where human-produced noise is not the dominant feature of the soundscape. More performance acts than conventional compositions, in situ works are often centered around the concept of interaction, impacting the features of an environments in ways that manipulate or reveal aspects of its soundscape.
   
  One example of such a work is artist Leif Brush’s Meadow Piano (1972), a grid-like structure that uses sensors to pick up weather conditions and nearby insect activity. The structure records these sounds and uses them to make its own aural responses, creating a back-and-forth communication with nature.[34] In Brush’s Terrain Instruments, a series of outdoor installation works that begun in the late ‘60s and continue on today, Brush uses electronic devices that turn sources of environmental motion (e.g. leaves, wind, precipitation) into sound via a variety of structures. These structures generally consist of strung “weaving and meshings” between tree clusters using tunable brass, steel, and copper wires. Rather than simply physically replicate environmental sounds or synthesize them from artificial sources, Brush aims for a direct-as-possible orchestration of actual natural forces as they are found in their places of origin.[35]
   
  David Dunn has also created a number of soundscape compositions that fall under this in situ category. Dunn describes these pieces as “real-time performances” that take place within “wilderness spaces,” and involve interacting with some component of that environment in a way that produces sound. In his Mimus Polyglottos, for example, Dunn, compelled by the mimetic skills of the mockingbird, recorded electronic tones in a range and rhythm that matched the mockingbird’s song. He played this recording back for an actual mockingbird in a forest, which reacted as if it had heard another mockingbird’s song. Dunn took things a step further with his Entrainments 1, in which he played an oscillator tone into a forest and recorded the annoyed response of a blue jay. He then played the recording of the blue jay’s response back into the forest and recorded the response of the wildlife again. He repeated this process numerous times until wildlife actually would become attracted to the sounds of the recording.[36]  
   
  For both Brush and Dunn, the music they create is more than just the sounds. Rather, it’s about the technology and its interaction with living systems. For the resulting sounds that do end up being produced through these interactions, Dunn emphasizes how they are “contextually bound… evidence of purposeful, living systems with attributes of mind” in their own right.”[37] By stressing the intelligence and conscious behind these living systems, the interactivity of in situ works explicitly rejects the traditional dichotomic relationship between music and nature.
   

  ---

  [1] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
   

  [2] Derrick, Reuben George. "Acoustic illuminations: recorded space as soundscape composition." Doctoral Thesis, 2014.
   

  [3] López, Francisco. "Profound listening and environmental sound matter."Audio culture: readings of modern music. New York (NY): Continuum International Publishing Group (2004): 82-87.
   

  [4] Derrick, Reuben George. "Acoustic illuminations: recorded space as soundscape composition." Doctoral Thesis, 2014.
   

  [5] Westerkamp, Hildegard. “Kits Beach Soundwalk.” Electronic Music Selections (1989). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk. Web. (Accessed 2 July 2016).
   

  [6] Krause, Bernie. Voices of the Wild: Animal Songs, Human Din, and the Call to Save Natural Soundscapes. Yale University Press, 2015.
   

  [7] Krause, Ibid.
   

  [8] Krause, Bernard L. Wild soundscapes: discovering the voice of the natural world: a book and CD recording. Wilderness Press, 2002. Print.
   

  [9] Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” In The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
   

  [10] Sterne, Jonathan. and Akiyama, Mitchell. “The Recording That Never Wanted to be Heard and Other Stories of Sonification.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
   

  [11] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
   

  [12] Supper, A. “The search for the“killer application”: Drawing the boundaries around the sonification of scientific data,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, Eds. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012, ch. 10, pp. 249–70. 

   

  [13] Adams, John Luther. The place where you go to listen: In search of an ecology of music. Wesleyan University Press, 2010.
   

  [14] Adams, Ibid.
   

  [15] Supper, A. “The search for the“killer application”: Drawing the boundaries around the sonification of scientific data,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, T. Pinch and K. Bijsterveld, Eds. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2012, ch. 10, pp. 249–70.
   

  [16] Grond, Florian, and Thomas Hermann. "Aesthetic strategies in sonification." AI & society 27, no. 2 (2012): 213-222.
   

  [17] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
   

  [18] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
   

  [19] Polli, Andrea et al. “Heat and the Heartbeat of the City,” web. http://archive.turbulence.org/Works/heat/index2.html
   

  [20] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
   

  [21] Schoon, Andi, and Dombois, Florin. “Sonification in music.” In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Auditory Display (ICAD 2009), Bern University of the Arts, May 2009.
   

  [22] Kim-Cohen, Ibid.
   

  [23] Kim-Cohen, Ibid.
   

  [24] Paquette, David, and Andra McCartney. "Soundwalking and the Bodily Exploration of Places." Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 1 (2012): 135.
   

  [25] Paquette and McCartney, Ibid.
   

  [26] Paquette, David, and Andra McCartney. "Soundwalking and the Bodily Exploration of Places." Canadian Journal of Communication 37, no. 1 (2012): 135.
   

  [27] Pacquette and McCartney, Ibid.
   

  [28] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "The soundscape on radio." Radio Rethink (1994): 86-94.
   

  [29] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
   

  [30] Kubisch, Christina. “Biography.” Christina Kubisch website, Web. http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/home.
   

  [31] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
   

  [32] Kubisch, Ibid.
   

  [33] Polli, A. “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.
   

  [34] Licht, A. Sound art, beyond music, between categories. New York, NY: Rizzoli International Publications, Inc., 2007.
   

  [35] Brush, Leif, and Gloria DeFilipps Brush. "Monitoring Nature's Sounds with Terrain-Based Constructions." Leonardo (1984): 4-7.
   

  [36] Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” In The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
   

  [37] Dunn, Ibid.
   
• 1 2016-08-24T16:20:44-07:00 Christina Kubisch 2 plain 2016-08-24T16:21:19-07:00

  Christina Kubisch, born in 1948, is a Berlin-based, first generation sound artist. Kubisch served as professor of sound art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Saarbrücken, Germany, from 1994-2013 and has been a member of the Academy of Arts of Berlin since 1997.1 Kubisch’s career corresponds with the rise of sound art as a recognized category in art, and she participated in what was likely the first exhibition consisting of solely found art, Berlin’s “Für Augen und Ohren” (“For Eyes and Ears”) of 1980.2 Kubisch specializes in multimedia installations, performances, and participatory experiences that incorporate electroacoustic audio with visual arts. That being said, many of Kubsich’s works focus on the synthesis of different forms of art, such as the physical and visual exploration of acoustic dimensions of time and space.1

  Out of her interest in exploring sounds produced by objects not normally considered “musical,” sonification methods play an important role throughout Kubisch’s oeuvre.3 For example, Kubisch is most well known among the soundscape composition world for her Electrical Walks of 2003. In these works, a unique combination audification with soundwalking, Kubisch guides participants through city streets wearing specially-designed headphones that “amplify electromagnetic fields into the range of human hearing.”2 Interesting, unexpected sounds arise from just about anywhere and anything that uses electricity – from lighting and wireless networks to antitheft security devices and cell phones.1

  Kubsich has presented her Electrical Walks across the globe, including Germany, England, France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, Spain, Japan, and the US.1 She has noted that each presentation is local to its given environment, with timbre and volume of the electromagnetic noise varying from site to site. However, the work is simultaneously a global phenomenon. Kubsich has found that while some sounds are unique to their site and others alike across the world, in all places, these electromagnetic noises are ubiquitous, and pop up in the most unexpected of places.1

  Additionally, the participant holds a large degree of agency in determining the outcome of the composition they hear. Following Kubisch’s prescribed route is only optional, and by adjusting their proximity and position relative to objects the participant can alter the timbres, intensities, and rhythms they hear, a freedom that Polli describes as “an opportunity to reestablish an ecological link with the source of information.”2,4 From this new link, Kubisch emphasizes a discovery of music in what might normally be cast off as meaningless noise. She describes the electromagnetic sounds revealed as “complex layers of high and low frequencies, loops of rhythmic sequences, groups of tiny signals, long drones and many things which change constantly and are hard to describe,” intricate worlds that demand attention and investigation.1 Kim-Cohen notes that by providing participants with these new, incricate worlds, Kubisch’s role becomes one typically assigned to a scientist rather than an artist, alerting the participant of “previously undisclosed facts.”2 But rather than merely notify participants of information, Kubisch has stated that she through Electrical Walks she aims to emphasize the shift in our perception of everyday reality that comes when one listens to a familiar environment through the unfamiliar context of the electromagnetic spectrum.1 While Electrical Walks does not explicitly explore human relationships to the natural soundscape, the work’s themes of reconnection and interrogation of our perspectives of the environments we situate ourselves in resonates with and also highlights challenges in the aims of other greenworks composers we’ll be exploring. Stay tuned…

  You can learn more about Christina Kubisch and her work at her website, http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/home.

   

  Works Cited

  1. Kubisch, Christina. “Biography.” Christina Kubisch website, Web.http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/home. (Accessed 7 July 2016).
  2. Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
  3. Orens, Geoff. Christina Kubisch Artist Biography. AllMusic.com, Web.http://www.allmusic.com/artist/christina-kubisch-mn0000048852/biography. (Accessed 7 July 2016)
  4. Polli, “Soundscape, sonification, and sound activism,” AI & Society, vol. 27, pp. 257–68, 2012.