Open Mind: Towards the Interdisciplinary and Multimodal
Like soundscape ecologists, legitimizing sound as a source of knowing has not implied for soundscape composers an exclusion of the visual. Many of the soundscape compositions previously addressed in this essay incorporate multiple mediums across the senses. Adams’s The Place includes an array of light panels that change color based on the time of day. Müller’s Bat was originally shown alongside painted oscillograms at an art gallery. McCarney’s Soundwalking Interactions has involved collaboration with dancers. Brush’s Terrain Instruments are as much sculptures integrated with the landscape as they are sound pieces.
For soundscape composers, the difference between sight and sound reflects a difference in how we perceive and interpret our relationship to the world around us. They recognize the subjectivity attributed to listening in culture-at-large, but embrace this subjectivity as a means of acquiring a different kind of knowledge. Sound artist David Dunn explains that vision essentially discriminates between things. Our eyes focus on edges and boundaries in an attempt to define and separate.[4] As a result, vision encourages hierarchical perception of the environment. From foreground to background, our environment becomes a linear arrangement of individual phenomena, individual objects. Discrete entities. When we listen, on the other hand, Dunn notes that it is often difficult to isolate the source of a single sound. Where does a sound begin? Where does it end? The more we listen, the more phenomena seem to become inseparable. From this perspective, the study of sound becomes a study of relationships.[5]
Other composers notice the physicality of this interconnectedness. John Luther Adams describes, “The visible stays ‘out there.’ The aural ‘comes inside’ us.”1 Here, Adams remarks on the haptic nature of sound, in that we come in direct contact with the physical vibrations of sound waves as they travel through the air. Thus, when we listen, we come into contact with our environment in a more intimate way. In this sense, listening becomes, in the words of sound artist Parmar, “…an act of engagement with our environment; we build meaning from sounds through interpretive and relational processes.”[6] Different physical, mental, and emotional experiences and perspectives come with each sensory experience. For soundscape composers, listening in particular becomes a metaphor for ecology, in that it is a way to study not the objects themselves but how they connect and how they function as gestalt, as a larger whole. Again this touches on the concept of holism - the soundscape functions as a collective network of many voices, and when even one of these voices goes out, the whole system is affected.
Holistic, Embodied, Immersed: A New Way of Knowing
As we've seen, the themes of the holistic and gestalt – of a whole greater than the sum of its parts – regularly surface in the context of soundscape composition as well as soundscape ecology. On one level, this could simply be related to the nature of the soundscape itself, as a complex collection of interacting biophonies, geophonies, and anthropophonies that vary along space and time. By stepping back, however, it becomes clear that the soundscape’s emphasis on the holistic has deeper roots that echo – and in some cases react against – existing twentieth century trends in the art and science worlds.
As previously discussed, the word “ecology” itself is holistic, relating to the “eco-” prefix (oikos, “household”) as the web of relationships of all living organisms within the context of their physical environments. However, the exact implications of word ecology, like “nature” and “music,” has changed and evolved over time. Early textbooks define ecology as “the study of the interactions that determine the distribution and abundance of organisms”[7] Later, the definition expands from a focus solely on the organisms to a larger system that includes the abiotic components they interact with, such as “The study of relationships between organisms and the environment”[8],and the “living and non- living parts, together with (their) total environment, interacting to form a stable system.”[9] This might be further extended to a definition that acknowledges recent emphases on how these interactions are nonlinear and vary over space and time, i.e., “The study of the interactions of organisms with one another and the physical and chemical environment on a range of temporal and spatial scales and how those feedback to influence the system.” These increasingly holistic definitions illustrate how ecologists recognize that scientific insight can be gained from all levels of biological hierarchy and organization. And indeed, ecology has branched into sub disciplines that study patterns and processes at the organismal, population, community, ecosystem, landscape, and global levels.
The development of soundscape ecology as a discipline could similarly be seen as a transition of the study of natural sound from a reductionistic to a holistic perspective. As discussed at the beginning of chapter two, recording birdsong for the study of bird behavior was originally a reductionistic process of extracting the sound out of the context of the natural environment for study in isolation. Soundscape ecology, however, asks different questions. In what ways do species rely or infer information from the sounds produced by other species? How does the introduction of anthropogenic noise pollution or the sounds of a new invasive species affect interactions? These types of questions are answered by indices of measurement that demand knowledge of the entire soundscape. One such type of measurement is the Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI), first developed by Pieretti et al. 2011. Without going into technical details here, the ACI processes sound files by interpolating the spatial distribution of a soundscape, gathering information from multiple recording stations set up across the study site. As it analyzes sounds along the frequency components of a spectrogram, it calculates “the amount of informa- tion produced by the acoustic activity of animals by measuring the relative differ- ence between two consecutive intensity values along a selected frequency band.”[10] It also has the potential of filtering out non-biological, continuous sounds depending on the scope of the study. Farina et al. note that the strength of the ACI lies in its ability for “rapid analysis of a large amount of sound data at different frequency and temporal scales” – the opposite of distilling down a recording to a single bird’s voice at one moment in time.[11] Instead, the ACI captures the “complex, eavesdropping network” of sounds making up the soundscape that Pieretti at al. refer to as the soundtope.[12]
One example of the ACI in action can be fouund in a study by Farina et al. that analyzes the impact of an invasive bird, the Red-billed Leiothrix, on the soundscape of a Mediterrannean shrubland, The ACI enabled the researchers to "measure the acoustic overlap between the Red-billed Leiothrix and the most acoustically active species," by calculating "the probability of registering a co-occurence of the song production of those species in the same recording minute."[13] They found from this analysis that the loud vocalizations of the Red-billed Leiothrix were dominating the soundscape, amounting to up to 37% of the all the sounds produced by the entire bird community.[14] A holistic perspective that considered broader interactions within the soundscape, not a parabolic microphone, allowed the researcher to make hypotheses about the invasive potential of the Red-billed Leiothrix.
In music, efforts to achieve “holism” in music are certainly not limited to the realm of soundscape composition. In the words of music journalist René van Peer, “Too often, pieces built from found materials fail to become an integrated whole, remaining only assorted components instead. Recognizable elements bundled together rarely give birth to new pieces.”[15] Meanwhile, musicologists eagerly hail achievements of thematic and formal unity in works from Sibelius to Beethoven.
Hildegard Westerkamp, however, believes that soundscape composers and other sound artists have a special challenge in creating works that appear as an “integrated whole.” A soundscape composer must create out of found sound materials “a piece with its own integrity,” “yet still sonically connected to the place and time of the original recordings and the composer’s own experiences.”[16]
Unlike standard composition, a soundscape composer does not have at his disposal individual notes and rhythms or the isolated sound objects as in the case of musique concrète. Rather, they must work sounds in the context of the entire soundscape. For this to happen, Westerkamp asserts that the composer must first intimately get to know the “soundscape itself, its rhythms and shapes, its atmosphere.”[17] Duhautpas calls Westercamp’s holistic approach to composition an “ecology of sound,” and poses it in direct contrast to the traditional way Western music has functioned: “For a long time, music has focused on the production of autonomous objects, erasing the listener’s relationship to the world in favour of a deep interiority.”[18] We can relate the reductionist notion of producing an “autonomous object” to the study of an isolated birdsong. Duhautpas, however, takes his analysis a step further by seeing this kind of music production as a cultural industry striving to achieve an autonomy where the piece becomes its own self-contained world – everything in the piece refers back to the piece itself and it serves its own interests (whether those interests lie in the composer’s personal self-expression or in reference to a specific religious or social agenda).[19] While Duhautpas’s logic here may be a bit over-generalized, it points to Mahler’s well-known turn of the phrase – “A symphony must be like the world. It must contain everything.”[20] According to Duhautpas, Westerkamp’s approach achieves soundscape composition’s goal of changing the listener’s relationship with the environment. By preserving the complexity of the soundscape within the finished composition, the listener is brought into a position of active participation. They must “reconstruct the links, the connections, the bonds; instead of being reified objects, sounds invite us into an act of listening.”[21] This reconstruction of parts back into a holistic whole speaks to Katherine Norman’s notion of montage and re-discovery in real-world music. As we’ve seen in her pieces like Window, for Norman, a soundscape composition is like a montage, “a purposeful ‘kit designed to be assembled’ from apparently incongruous elements.” As an active listener “we resynthesize our fractured listening processes” to ” ‘rediscover’ the relationships between them.”[22]
Sound artist Francisco López also suggests the holistic through his assertion that environmental music is valuable because it allows the listener to realize that soundscapes are composed of more points of interest than a few emblematic biophonies. López notes that while composers have long been inspired by nature, sonic imagery does not commonly extend beyond a few familiar tropes, such as birdsong and the gentle flowing of a pastoral stream. Soundscape compositions can lift us from these trips and also from our habitual focus on animal sounds in the soundscape.[23] Composer John Luther Adams further posits that this type of holistic approach is necessary not only a reflection of the specific goals of in music, but a nod towards this new direction in which science as a whole is heading: “We live in a time of great exploration and discovery. But unlike those of previous eras, the important explorations of our time are not new places. The most important discoveries are not new phenomena. The great learning of our time is of the endlessly complex and subtle interrelationships between places and organisms, between everything in nature from the subatomic to the cosmic.”[24] In this way, practitioners of soundscape composition promote the same imaginative mindset and deeper appreciation for the complexity of the environment that soundscape ecology encourages by shifting focus from individual call to broader relationships and patterns of sounds. Yes, there is music in the birdsong, but also meters in the tides, percussion in the rainstorms, rhythm and synchronization in the sonic interactions of all living creatures.
[1] Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, “New Keys to the World of Sound.” In The Oxford handbook of sound studies. Pinch, Trevor, and Karin Bijsterveld, eds. Oxford University Press, 2011.
[2] 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.
[3] Slater, Peter. “Sounds Natural: The Song of Birds." In Sound. Kruth, Patricia, and Stobart, Henry, eds. Darwin College Lectures, Cambridge University Press, 2000. Print.
[4] 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.
[5] Dunn, Ibid.
[6] Parmar, Robin. "The garden of adumbrations: reimagining environmental composition." Organised Sound 17, no. 03 (2012): 202-210.
[7] Krebs, CJ. Ecology: The Experimental Analysis of Distribution and Abundance. New York, NY: Harper and Row, 1972.
[8] Molles, M. Ecology: Concepts and Applications. Dubuque, IA: McGraw-Hill, 1999.
[9] Yeang, K. Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design. Great Britain: Wiley-Academy, 2006.
[10] Pieretti, Nadia, Almo Farina, and Davide Morri. “A new methodology to infer the singing activity of an avian community: the Acoustic Complexity Index (ACI).” Ecological Indicators 11, no. 3 (2011): 868-873.
[11] Pieretti, Ibid.
[12] Farina, Almo, Nadia Pieretti, and Rachele Malavasi. “Patterns and dynamics of (bird) soundscapes: A biosemiotic interpretation.” Semiotica 2014, no. 198 (2014).
[13] Farina, Almo, Nadia Pieretti, and Niki Morganti. “Acoustic patterns of an invasive species: the Red-billed Leiothrix (Leiothrix lutea Scopoli 1786) in a Mediterranean shrubland.” Bioacoustics 22, no. 3 (2013): 175-194.
[14] Farina, Ibid.
[15] Westerkamp, Hildegard. "Linking soundscape composition and acoustic ecology." Organised Sound 7, no. 01 (2002): 51-56.
[16] Westerkamp, Ibid.
[17] Westerkamp, Ibid.
[18] Duhautpas, Frédérick, and Solomos, Makis Solomos. "Hildegard Westerkamp and the Ecology of Sound as Experience: Notes on Beneath the Forest Floor." Soundscape, The Journal of Acoustic Ecology, vol. 13 no. 1 (2014).
[19] Duhautpas, Ibid.
[20] “A Debut Symphony That Embraced the World.” Deceptive Cadence, NPR Classical. Web. http://www.npr.org/sections/deceptivecadence/2014/04/08/300616048/a-debut-symphony-that-embraced-the-world
[22] Norman, Katherine. "Real-World Music as Composed Listening.” Contemporary Music Review, Vol. 15, Part 1 (1996).
[23] 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.
[24] Adams, John Luther. Winter music: composing the North. Wesleyan University Press, 2004.