Composer, artist, and bioacoustics researcher David Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Sound Art and Design in Music and Digital Arts and New Media at UC Santa Cruz. Dunn’s site-specific, research-oriented work emphasizes how listening strategies can be used in the context of environmental sound monitoring. Technology plays a big part in his work, serving as a tool to “facilitate interactions with other living systems.” Most of Dunn’s pieces can best be described as real-time performance that take place within natural environments, “wilderness spaces,” and involve interacting with some component of that environment in a way that produces sound. This might be better described with a few examples. In his Mimus Polyglottos, Dunn, compelled by the mimetic skills of the mockingbird, recorded electronic tones in a range and rhythm that matched the mockingbird’s song and played it back for an actual mockingbird in a forest, which reacted as if it had heard another mockingbird’s song. In Entrainments 1, Dunn played an oscillator tone into a forest and recorded the annoyed response of a blue jay. He played 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.

As these examples show, Dunn’s music is more than just the sounds. It’s 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. In stressing the intelligence and conscious behind these living systems that Dunn interacts with, Dunn has explicitly rejected what he calls the “traditional” relationship between music and nature. “The issue,” Dunn has remarked, “is not how one can bring out the latent musical qualities in nature, but rather, what is necessary to stipulate an intrinsic sonic structure emergent from a specific interaction with nonhuman systems.” In this way, Dunn’s work reminds us that we a part of a vast network of ecological processes and interactions much larger than ourselves. With this “larger system” in mind, Dunn stresses the indeterminate, exploratory nature of his work. For his interactive work like Mimus Polyglottos (1976) and Entertainments 1, “because I [Dunn] cannot know what the outcome of these interactions will be, I am often gaining information from an experimental situation that cannot be arrived at otherwise.”

Dunn’s attitude of exploration can also be found in his more formal tape compositions. Using technology to alter environmental sounds (a style that has influenced the work of Francisco López), these pieces have been described as a sort of “hybrid between electroacoustic composition and soundscape recording.” One example of this type of work is Dunn’s 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” created from the autonomous interaction of all the life in it, terms not dissimilar to those used by complexity theorists to describe the nest colonies of the eusocial insects…” With this in mind, Chaos represents another manifestation of Dunn’s interest in holistic interactions and relations. Because Dunn fuses together 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.”

Dunn’s emphasis on listening and relationships entrenches his work in both an aesthetic and scientific context. 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.” What Dunn 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 – a common attitude for many of the greenworks composers we’ve encountered. By “paying close attention to the reality of what actually is,” Dunn encourages his audiences, “there arises the opportunity to participate in the emergence of something that is mutually created between the subject and [themselves].”

 

Works Cited

1. Dunn, David. “Nature, Sound Art, and the Sacred.” In Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. The book of music and nature: an anthology of sounds, words, thoughts. Rothenberg, David, and Marta Ulvaeus, eds. Wesleyan University Press, 2013. Print.
2. Dunn, David. “Wilderness as reentrant form: Thoughts on the future of electronic art and nature.” Leonardo(1988): 377-382.
3. David Dunn Website, Web. http://www.davidddunn.com/~david/HOME.htm. (Accessed 13 July 2016).
4. Helmreich, Stefan. “Underwater music: tuning composition to the sounds of science.” InThe Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.