Familiar and Foreign: Cultivating a “Glocal” Mindset
For some composers, the creative use of real-world sounds is vital exactly because it destroys a listener’s normal perception of reality. Entering the realm of imagination, Katherine Norman describes that this enables the listener to “travel away from both listening, and experiential, assumptions.”[2] Norman engages with these themes in her work Bells and Gargoyles (1996), a collage of digitally-manipulated recordings made on a stormy night in the village of Hatersage, Derbyshire. Norman describes this piece as a suspenseful, nocturnal journey where “outer reality becomes confused with inner imagination.” Free from the barriers of assumption, a listener is more likely to explore, engage with, and ask questions about unfamiliar sounds rather than reject them outright as something that doesn’t fit into their conception of reality.[3]
The use of active imagination when listening to soundscape composition, in a way, directly contrasts from how society normally presents music to us. In his book Noise: The Political Economy of Music, economist Jacques Attali sketches music, particularly mainstream popular music, as a “commodified product of the music business” which “seeks to repeat messages already received, digested, and therefore comfortable and comforting.”[4] Rather than repeating messages already digested, soundscape compositions introduce the listener to unknown and unexplored worlds of sound. By introducing the listener to soundscapes from around the world, a soundscape composer encounters challenges similar to musicians and composers who draw from the traditions of unfamiliar (i.e., non-Western) cultures, challenges that have already been encountered in the fields of anthropology and ethnomusicology. Ethnomusicologist Steven Feld describes that when a soundscape composer deals with “worlds of sound” – “the multiplicity of distinctively local environmental soundscapes mapping the globe, and the complex ways their distinctiveness blurs as they change through space and time” – they must recognize that they are also dealing with the “sounds of the world” – the “diversity of human musical practices” found within and throughout these soundscapes.[5] In other words, a recognition of the foreign in music necessitates a recognition of the extramusical dimension behind the sounds. Kubisch, for example has presented her Electrical Walks across the globe, including Germany, England, France, Ireland, Sweden, Switzerland, Slovakia, Spain, Japan, and the US. While the presentation format remains the same for each location, Kubisch notes how each soundwalk experience is local to its given environment, with the timbre and volume of the electromagnetic noise varying from site to site. 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.[6] In this way, the Electrical Walks are simultaneously a global phenomenon, a unique convergence of local and global mindsets.
Fabio Ciardi addresses the concepts of locality and globality in his article “Local and Global Connotations in Sonic Composition.” Ciardi describes a “global” method of composition in which musical material is regarded as completely self-referential – a method that rejects the existence of Feld’s extramusical dimension. From this abstract, Pythagorean perspective, global music rejects any “possible semantic ties between the sound and the world.” A “local” music, however, actively draws from “local elements” in their environment. A local composer recognizes the historical and cultural connotations behind the way they use their sounds and focuses on how these sounds signify and express the relationship the composer has with the world around them.[7] Ciardi goes on to outline a continuum of attitudes by which a composer can incorporate “locality” into their work. On one end, a local composition can take on a “colonial” approach. Roughly equivalent to exoticism in classical music, a colonial composer uses material connected to a local situation or context for the purpose of “colour[ing] a style with atmospheres pertaining to far-off lands.”[8] In this approach, dominant cultures “subjugate” sounds of the Other, assimiliating foreign frames of reference into a familiar style. A colonial composer, then, may be local on the superficial level but his aims are ultimately global. The music of the world enters the world of his music. At the other end of the spectrum is the post-colonial, or “ecological” approach. Here, rather than forcing the local elements into a familiar frame, the composer allows his material to be shaped by the local elements.[9] As Ciardi describes, “the sound and the network of relationships that define it are not simply chosen in order to be used within a predefined syntactic framework, but instead they are considered as elements that can cause profound changes in the strategies and syntaxes used by the composer.”6 Importantly, the rules, philosophies, and traditions of the local culture is taken into account by the composer. The composer’s own background, methods, and styles may still be evident in the piece but “no local element seems to feel the need to dominate the other, but on the contrary each one is used in an original way to convey various aspects of the other.”[10] It is on this ecological end of the spectrum where soundscape compositions reside.
Francisco López, for example, finds no contradiction in infusing his soundscapes with sampled sounds from sources ranging from insects and human voices to heavy metal bands. He often manipulates the recordings so to erase any hint of where the sound may have come from, a process López describes as “exploring blurred territory between reality and the creation of self-contained sound environments through a long process of transformation of sonic materials.”[11] Take his 1997 piece La Selva, a montage of field recordings from the La Selva rainforest reserve in Costa Rica. López is not interested in creating an accurate or easily digestible representation of the rainforest soundscape for listeners. While species can be identified from the recording, López made the effort that “none are singled out in the process of recording and editing.” López contrasts this with commercially-released “pure” recordings that contribute to a “restricted and bucolic view of nature” by artificially mixing “various animal vocalizations” over a generic “background matrix of environmental sound” – a process Ciardi would describe as assimilating the foreign into the familiar.[12] For López sound recording is not a travel documentary concerned with providing listeners “a richer and more significant ‘real’ world.” Rather, “it focuses on the inner world of sounds” that challenges a listener to expand their aural understanding of nature. For instance, in La Selva, López highlights how geophonic sounds like wind and rain change when filtered through different plant material, topography, and topsoil material, bringing awareness to the fact that “A sound environment is the consequence not only of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements." Revealing these subtleties contributes to an “uglier” but more authentic conception of La Selva is a noisy place, filled with “multiple rich, complex layers.”[13]
By incorporating recorded environmental sounds, soundscape composers like López lets the formal, aural, aesthetic, and sociopolitical outcomes of their work be shaped not only by their personal agenda but by “the complexity of local sonic landscapes” themselves.[14] In so doing, the soundscape becomes much more than the sound-in-itself. It achieves a revelation that Rosalind Krauss has attributed to postmodern art: “away from the notion of consciousness as unified within itself…” to where “…the very existence and meaning of the “I” is thus dependent on its manifestation to the “other.”[15] Soundscape works, in this way, are works of the Other. This embracing of the Other echoes of similar sentiments in experimental music, a genre that explicit attempts to stretch the ear’s ability to structure and conceive unfamiliar sounds as music, whether through unconventional instrumental techniques or using everyday household objects to produce “musical” sounds. However, a soundscape composer deals with not just a musical unfamiliarity, but a social and political unfamiliarity.
Hildegard Westerkamp, for example, describes that as a composer who records her own sounds and soundscapes, whether or not she is a foreigner to the environment is an important factor that shapes the outcome her work – “it inevitably influences the choices of sound sources, the acoustic perspective, the emphasis of microphone placement as well as what message a piece may transmit.”[16] As a visitor to a soundscape, a composer may have the advantage of noticing details that local inhabitants take for granted. However, there is a danger of being “so unfamiliar with cultural, social and political undercurrents and subtleties of a place or a situation that we can’t help but create a superficial, touristic sonic impression of a place.”[17] Ultimately, Westerkamp suggests that approaching a soundscape from both familiar and foreign perspectives can be enlightening, but only if the composer remains conscious of their relationship to the place and the situation.8 For John Luther Adams, the indigenous sounds of his former Alaskan home are key to his work. According to Adams, “like our precious remnants of physical wilderness, the cultures of the “developing world” are viewed as storehouses of raw materials and products for exploitation and consumption.” By consciously choosing to respectfully use the sounds of their immediate environment and its local peoples, a composer for Adams helps “to create genuine alternatives to global monoculture.”[18]
The insistence that soundscape composers such as Westerkamp demonstrate towards hearing their works as “ecological” rather than “colonial” local works can be paralleled to Steven Feld’s notion of celebratory and anxious narratives in the context of the “world music” genre. Soundscape composers fit their work into a “celebratory narrative” in the way that proponents of world music have insisted on “world music’s abilities to reassert place and locale against globalization.” Feld describes that this narrative emphasizes “fusion forms as rejections of bounded, fixed, or essentialized identities” and places “positive emphasis on fluid, deessentialized identities.”[19] Likewise, a soundscape composer does not present an unaltered environmental recording to an audience but “fuses” and distorts its identity, mixing soundscapes from multiple locales, adding commentary or other synthesized sounds, and altering the soundscape through technology (e.g., sound processing and editing techniques, sonification, or audification). This modification and transformation is not a process of distancing oneself from local sounds. Rather, it is a process of reconnection, a fulfilling of what Adams describes as “that most basic creative need – to rediscover and recreate order between ourselves and the world around is” through “continually renew[ing] our connections with older, deeper sources.”[20]
[1] “How Many Species are There?” The Environmental Literacy Council, Web. http://enviroliteracy.org/ecosystems/classifying-species/how-many-species-are-there/
[2] Norman, Katherine. "Real-World Music as Composed Listening.” Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 15, Part 1 (1996).
[4] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
[5] Feld, Steven. “Sound Worlds.” In Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[6] Kubisch, Christina. “Biography.” Christina Kubisch website, Web. http://www.christinakubisch.de/en/home.
[7] Ciardi, Fabio Cifariello. "Local and Global Connotations in Sonic Composition." Organised Sound 13, no. 02 (2008): 123-135.
[8] Ciardi, Ibid.
[9] Ciardi, Fabio Cifariello. "Local and Global Connotations in Sonic Composition." Organised Sound 13, no. 02 (2008): 123-135.
[10] Ciardi, Ibid.
[11] López, Francisco. "Profound listening and environmental sound matter." In Audio culture: readings of modern music. New York (NY): Continuum International Publishing Group (2004): 82-87.
[12] López, Francisco. "Profound listening and environmental sound matter." In Audio culture: readings of modern music. New York (NY): Continuum International Publishing Group (2004): 82-87.
[13] López, Francisco. "Profound listening and environmental sound matter." In Audio culture: readings of modern music. New York (NY): Continuum International Publishing Group (2004): 82-87.
[14] López, Ibid.
[15] Kim-Cohen, Seth. In the Blink of an Ear: Toward a Non-Cochlear Sonic Art. London: Continuum, 2009. Print.
[16] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
[17] Westerkamp, Ibid.
[18] Adams, John Luther. Winter music: composing the North. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.
[19] Feld, Steven. “Sound Worlds.” In Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[20] Adams, Ibid.
