Katherine Norman (1960- ) is a freelance composer, sound artist, and writer based in London. Currently a research fellow at De Montfort University, Norman uses computers to compose with recorded sound from real world environments. Through her pieces she seeks to “create poetry from the activity of our so-called ordinary lives.” Most of her compositions are a combination of text, image and sound in “audio-led interactive pieces.” Her work, which she describes as a “sonic equivalent to montage film,” emphasizes a rediscovery of the familiar in a more poignant, revealing perspective. But rather than attempting to transcend the familiar through abstracting the sounds she records, her work is ultimately highly contextual, drawing dies between listening, memory, and sense of place.

A few of her soundscape-based works:

• Bells and Gargoyles (1996) – Scored “for sound alone,” this piece presents a soundscape created digitally from 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.” 
• Burwell (2009) – Burwell is a soundscape composition composed of field recordings of made in April and May of 2009 in Burwell, a village in Cambridgeshire, England. The piece is divided into five general sections (“Dawn,” “Rain,” “Bells,” “Wind,” and “Night.”) At the time, Norman was living in Burwell next to a church, separated from the house by a ruined wall of clunch (an old local building material). Witnessing the restoration of this clunch wall as she recorded sounds, Burwell reflects for Norman her growing interest in the extent to which local materials – both sonic and tangible – “infiltrate and continue to build a presence in the places we come to know as home.” 
• Window (for John Cage) (2012) – A winner of the 2012 New Media Writing Prize, Window is an “interactive sound essay” that explores the everyday experience of listening. As tribute to Cage’s assertion that “everything is worth a listen,” Norman emphasizes the “deliberate indirection” of the piece, recording whatever sounds happened to be outside of her window throughout the year. In the work, a user explores the soundscape of different months of the year outside the artist’s window by dragging different elements of the soundscape across the screen and reading text descriptions and window-view images associated with each month. The sounds are quite ordinary – birds, muffled traffic, rainfall, neighbors talking. While irrelevant to the general listener, to Norman, they hold an intimate familiarity, a “dynamic construction of place and the human experience of place through the accumulation of sensory perception, repetition, memory and emotion.” Extrapolated from her personal experience and placed in a public domain of Internet interactivity, a user has the chance to play with these sounds, memories, and associations – attending to the ordinary to “make it extraordinary.” In a choose-you-own-adventure fashion, a user has the freedom to make the narrative experience of the text as linear or fragmentary as they want, and move sounds in their own way to create a “self-constructed place.” 

Works Cited

1. Artists – Katherine Norman. electocd.com, Web.http://www.electrocd.com/en/bio/norman_ka/. (Accessed 26 July 2016).
2. Katherine Norman. Katherine Norman website. Web. http://www.novamara.com/. (Accessed 26 July 2016).
3. Whittall, Arnold. “Katherine Norman – London.” Gramophone, Web.http://www.gramophone.co.uk/review/katharine-norman-london. (Accessed 26 July 2016).
4. Norman, Katherine. “Window – And Undecided Sound Essay.” Journal of Sonic Studies, volume 4, no. 1 (May 2013). http://journal.sonicstudies.org/vol04/nr01/a03