Field Recordings
Case Study #1: David Dunn, Chaos and the Emergent Mind of the Pond (1992) and The Sound of Light in Trees (2006)
David Dunn is a 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 2001). Dunn’s pieces have been described as a of hybrid between electroacoustic music and soundscape recording. That being said, technology plays a big part in his work, serving as a tool to “facilitate interactions with other living systems.” One example of this can be heard in 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 (Helmreich 2011). Similar to The Sound of Light in Trees, Dunn’s collage attempts to illustrate the sophisticated rhythmic complexity he heard in these ponds. In his book Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles describes The Sound of Light in Trees as “not just a recording but a composition that takes, remakes, and rearranges nonhuman sound” (Raffles 2010). Similar to Schaeffer’s musique concrète, Dunn has expressed that his field recordings aim to “reveal aspects of time and space that are inherent in the materials" (Raffles 2010). Unlike musique concrète, however, in which sounds are manipulated primarily to emphasize and express human intervention, Dunn’s make a listener more aware of the complexity and beauty in nonhuman sounds.
Case Study #2: Francisco López, La Selva
Francisco López is an experimental musician and sound artist based in Madrid, Spain. His soundscape works, which utilize his own field recordings, take form as concerts, workshops, and sound installations. Since 1993, he has also released a substantial catalogue of sound pieces, collaborations with artists in both live and studio settings, on CD. A trained entomologist, López’s has recorded all over the world, from the wild plateaus of Patagonia and the rainforests of Costa Rica to urban and interior settings (Kim-Cohen 2009). López infuses his soundscapes with sampled sounds from sources ranging from insects and human voices to heavy metal bands (López 2009). 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” (López 2004).
Francisco López’s La Selva is a field recording piece that uses sounds recorded during the rainy season at the La Selva Biological Station in Costa Rica in 1995 and 1996, and was released on CD in 1998 (López 2004). The piece lasts for a little over an hour. Similar to Dunn’s The Sound of Light in Trees, it takes the listener through a dense chorus of insects that gradually shifts in composition and intensity. The listener also experiences a diverse palette of other discrete sections, that includes birds, flowing stream, gurgling rivers, intense rainstorms, and deep echoing wind. Unlike many of his other works, López does not alter the sounds he recorded in any way except for grouping sequences of the sounds within different themes that follow a chronology from day to night (López 2004). Yet although the recordings themselves remain unaltered, a strange type of music still seems to emerge, from the polyrhythm of the insects, to the melodies of the birds, to the pedal drones of the rivers and waterfalls.
Case Study #3: Bernie Krause and Richard Blackford, The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony
Bernie Krause is regarded as one of the leading experts in the understanding and field recording of natural soundscapes. Under his organization Wild Sanctuary, Krause has spent more than 45 years building up an audio archive of over 4,500 hours of wild soundscapes that contain the sounds of 15,000 identified species. Krause himself has a background as a musician, having replaced folk singer Pete Seeger’s position in The Weavers 1963-64. Krause later studied electronic music, and with his duo partner Paul Beaver is credited with helping introduce the synthesizer to film and pop music. Krause’s current focus in bioacoustics and the natural soundscape grew out of this interest in recording technology (Krause 2013). Today, Krause advocates for the preservation and respect for wild voices in the face of human activity that is increasingly silencing soundscapes via habitat alteration and destruction. According to Krasue’s Wild Sanctuary site, “fully half” of the recording in his audio archive “are from habitats that no longer exist, are radically altered because of human endeavor, or have gone altogether silent” (Krause 2017). Krause’s collaboration with Blackford in producing The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony is just one example of his efforts to inform and raise awareness to the public on the peril of biodiversity loss.
The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony was premiered on July 12, 2014 at the Cheltenham Festival by the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. Composed by Richard Blackford, the piece incorporates and intertwines with soundscape field recordings recorded and assembled by Bernie Krause. The piece has a five-movement structure and a strings-and-winds instrumentation not unlike a Western classical symphony. An electronic keyboard placed at the center of the orchestra, however, introduces something different to the scene. Rather than playing the sounds of a piano, the player at keyboard activates clips of Krause's pre-recorded natural sounds (McManus 2014). These sounds aren’t merely an added surface layer to the symphonic texture, however. Interjections from animals and weather from different parts of the world mesh into the rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic activity of the live instruments, sometimes mimicking and sometimes introducing new motifs that the orchestra later takes up.
Blackford was inspired to compose this piece after reading Krause’s book The Great Animal Orchestra, published in 2012. In the book, Krause uses the term “biophony” to describe the collective voices generated by the living organisms in a natural habitat at a given point in time. Krause uses the metaphor of the orchestra to describe the acoustical organization of animal voices in a soundscape. Just as different musical instruments operate within different pitch ranges in an orchestra, the many sounds of insects, amphibians, birds, and mammals occupy their own time and frequency “niches” (Krause 1987, 2014). And just as different instrument sections interact with each other (e.g., through call and response, between harmonic and melodic parts, between a soloist and group), Krause has studied how animals also interact with each other through the sounds they make. In The Great Animal Orchestra Symphony, Blackford set out to create a piece shaped by the changing texture and contrast in Krause’s recordings, deriving melodic and rhythmic cells from different biophonies as building blocks to inform the outcome of his own orchestral music (Krause 2014).
For example, in Movement II, Scherzo with Riffs - Vivace (North America), a layered chorus of Pacific tree frogs open the movement. The frogs’ collective calls provide a rhythmic motor which is taken up by the percussion (shakers, rattles, woodblocks) and extends into playful, syncopated wind interjections. The rapid pecking of a woodpecker recording inspires occasional 16th note interruptions that pop out of the sparse texture from various percussion instruments. At 2:57, another recording tree frogs gives way to a recap of the original rhythmic riffs, this time giving way to a timpani solo that leads to a rhythmically unison jazz-like tutti throughout the orchestra. In Movement V, Variations: Song of the Musician Wren – Vivace (Central America), a recording of the angular, wide ranging call of musician wren is taken up by the piccolo and expanded across the orchestra in a series of variations based on the theme provided by the wren. The wren’s theme is occasionally obscured by interjections of other bird calls which influence the orchestra (including the common pottoo and the screaming piha), but eventually the wren’s theme reemerges in a celebratory close.
