Foregrounding Background

By Christopher Olson

Four listening instances in reverse chronological order:

I.

2011. I’m at the kitchen table in Nara, Japan for my weekly headphone session

with Framework:Afield, a radio show and podcast “consecrated to field recording and it’s use in composition.” It’s been a vital weekly ritual for a few years now. Instead of the usual raw or processed documents of the world-at large, this week’s episode features a long-form piece by the singularly-named Omalto, using sound environments found in the popular online game “Second Life.” Chirping birds, crickets, waterfalls, the brittle rustle of leaves and other bits of canned nature fade into digital footsteps, keystrokes and a fuzzy pile-on of players’ voices—one can imagine the artist’s avatar walking through the virtual environment equipped with headphones and a shotgun mic. There’s a refreshing lack of overt criticality to the work: in lieu of expected heavy-handed statements about identity, technology and conviviality vis-a-vis web hyper-connectivity, the layers of sound act as a subtle form of inquiry.

 

II.

Playing the nocturnal stealth game Manhunt on PS2 a few years ago in Vancouver, taking a break in the shadows and letting my character stand idle, I marveled at the sound design: the familiar dull hum of a city in the middle of the night chording with the breeze after a sudden rainfall, a soundscape privy to most night owls. Amazed that a video game could represent it so well.

 

III.

Headphone session in Vancouver, a 2002 live CD by the Seattle Phonographers Union, who use field recordings as raw material for large-ensemble improvisation. Crowd sounds, playgrounds and train crossings took on an abstractly-musical shape. By bringing diverse sources into and out of the mix, visualized spaces overlapped and shifted in mental left-to-right screen wipes and questions about site-specificity, narrative and indexicality eventually dissolved into a rich, pleasurable wash.

 

IV.

Cold night in Winnipeg in 1997, listening to The Vancouver Soundscape. A landmark work in the then-budding multidisciplinary field of Acoustic Ecology, it was a record dedicated to documenting the sonic environment of a fast-growing city developing its legs back in the early 1970s. The sound of a harbour-front was interrupted by intermittent horn blasts. Slowly, the sound of train whistles began to reply. The mind’s eye became confused: which one is it? Dock or railroad? The two sources answered each other like dueling banjos, or crows communicating from telephone wires: Is it both? Listening to “The Music of Horns and Whistles” was a revelatory experience. By manipulating two simple sound sources, a short-circuit happened: the mind’s insistence on recalling or assigning visuals to associative sounds became unnecessary.

 

See Hear

These experiences unveiled a secret, barely-audible world. Just as one can look but not see, one can hear but how often does one listen? It’s an old saw, I know, smelling of “Be Here Now” baby-boomer spirituality and borrowed Zen lifted out of the John Cage playbook—but one that still bears repeating. In terms of the broad banners of “field recording” and “phonography,” the act of simply listening is a welcome exercise these days, available on a weekly basis via my podcast folder. Afterwards, listening-as-practice gets carried into the mundane, outside world until the next instalment.

Field recording/Phonography goes hand-in-hand with what American composer Pauline Oliveros calls “deep listening”: an intuitive and selective practice that trains the ear to become more receptive and finely-attuned to acoustic phenomena; the things that already exist but go unnoticed. Similar to contemporary improvisation’s reliance on the tiniest, most lowercase of sounds and extended stretches of silence (“Everything quieter than everything else”, to invert the slogan on a Motorhead t-shirt), phonography makes listening an active skill, the audible world an extension of the Buddhist notion that, bear with me here, (capital-or-small-“E”) enlightenment already exists, but is buried under layers of patterned conditioning and other obstructions. Phonography and field recordingbased work can re-orient the listener outside of habitual perception, and once that shift takes place, a life experienced inattentively seems withered and dull. This kind of attention can be augmented by simple devices. Similar to photography, there is the world, and then there is the world as it presents itself when framed through the viewfinder. The mundane act of walking to the corner store can change when mediated through earphones and real-time monitoring on a recording device. As noted by a member of the New England Phonographers Union: the act of using the microphone as a divining rod can open one up to discover small grains of sound, overlooked ambiguities. The group recently recorded and performed an ensemble piece at a sewage treatment plant on an island outside of Boston Harbor, demonstrating how a chorus of industrial fans or pipes coursing with waste sludge can become inspiring, even musical once the visual referent is removed. The ears can’t see.

 

Recorded History

The use of field recording as a discipline and compositional tool has a rich and varied lineage. A lineage that goes back to the early 20th century in Musique Concrete where in the composition Étude aux Chemins de Fer Pierre Schaeffer confounded by using recordings of steam locomotives as music. To trace field recording as a creative practice, one must also trace other disciplines along with the evolution of its tools. With the forward march of technology, portable recording devices were used for ethnographic and academic pursuits, notably by folklorists John and Alan Lomax documenting and preserving oral traditions from field hollers to regional folk songs of the United States for the Library of Congress. Jump forward a few decades as definitions of “music” splintered through amplification, electro-acoustic composition, sound collage experiments incorporating electronic signals and processed recordings by lab coats at Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center and the use of audiotape as a plastic medium by psychedelic bands and for broadcast (check the BBC Radiophonic Workshop or Glenn Gould’s work in the CBC archives online sometime). Add to the mix: the development of sound effects and foley work in radio and cinema, the proto-new-age “Environments” series of LPs (full album sides of ocean waves or a thunderstorm), the birth of Ambient (or Brian Eno’s version) and New Age music spiralling out from earlier progressive and “kosmische” music. The use of recorded sound evolved in diverse, often intersecting directions, braiding commercial, broadcast, novelty and loftier art considerations leading to contemporary work aided by the advent of the computer workstation.

 

Saturation

As sound recording equipment became more compact and less cumbersome, the shoulderslung reel-to-reel tape recorder and shotgun mic of yore has given way to smaller, more affordable gear. Now spoiled for choice in sound recording smartphone apps, one can do their flaneur/dérive thing and upload it directly to SoundCloud. Along with affordable “prosumer” compact stereo recorders like the Zoom hitting the market, there is now more work produced by anyone with an interest, be it passing and/or passionate, and consequently, more time demands on the listener. Like the advent of digital photography democratizing the medium, the audio field has become saturated with sounds posted online by amateur (yours truly) and veteran sound artists alike.

As noted by Simon Reynolds in Retromania, the side-effect of the Internet and its unfettered one-click availability of, well, pretty much everything, is that one requires an iron resolve to be selective when it comes to gratifying their archival/collector’s impulses, lest exhaustion ruin one’s sensibilities. He calls it “franticity”: the buzz of discovery, combined with the lemming-like pull towards an ocean of swarming data one can barely process. Anyone who’s spent time on UbuWeb or lost a day off digging through endless obscuro music sharity blogs understands this binge anxiety.

Thankfully, there are venues which offer curated respite. Alongside podcasts offered by NatureSounds.jp and longtime stalwart Touch Records, Framework Radioairing on London’s Resonance FM and available freely for download, is one of the key showcases of current phonographic practice. From raw documentation to longform composition, this is where the best of the medium opens up. On air, buried within the playlists of countless avant-noise-ambient community and college radio programs, venues like WFMU’s Airborne Event, Soundscape on Co-op Radio in Vancouver and Winnipeg’s Send + Receive festival’s radio program on CKUW act as venues for sound art, current and old, including phonography. Meanwhile, SoundTransit (www.turbulence.org/soundtransit) offers brief recordings from all over the world in mix format while recording boffins talk shop Web 1.0-style on the decade-old Yahoo Phonography group.

Recently, field recording has exploded. Labels like 12k and Room40 offer soundscapes-as-colour through melodic, ambient and drone artists like Sawako, Taylor Deupree, Chihei Hatakeyama, and Lawrence English, many of whom incorporate environmental recordings as another texture or instrument. Established artists like former Cabaret Voltaire member Chris Watson, who moonlights as recordist for Sir David Attenborough’s high-production value nature docs on BBC, offers dense, immersive natural soundscapes with high-end gear, or takes us to the brittle, frozen silence of Antarctica. Geir Jensen, aka Biosphere, incorporates source recordings from his travels and offers straight-faced documentation of mountaineering in Tibet. Additionally, Aki Onda works with an archive of diaristic cassette tapes and multiple Walkmans, and Toshiya Tsunoda records naturally-occurring phenomena through tubes and bottles, or contact mics to capture the creaks of a dock, or zeroes in on the vibrations made by air itself.

Another active and prolific player in contemporary sound art is Francisco Lopez, who creates long-form, harrowing multi-channel sound arcs for pitch-black room and blindfolded audience using a variety of source materials. Whether exploring the canned machismo of metal, satirizing 5.1 movie sound effects THX-engineered for maximum punch, or using his own field recordings of machinery or rainforests, these pieces tend to begin as delicate and build in volume into an intense, extended crescendo—in the live setting, an hour-long panic attack that entombs the audience—before dropping back to deafening, and welcome silence. Lopez is beyond prolific- with 250-plus releases to date and is also an erudite, knowledgeable essayist on the form, writing on bio-acoustics and is an outspoken critic of the avant-garde’s strictures, the cult of John Cage, and Acoustic Ecology.

 

Noise Annoys/Mercy, Mercy Me

At Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, parallel cultural and political shifts of the 1960s helped produce Acoustic Ecology, an interdisciplinary field that focused on sound mapping with a naturalistic bent, formed via R. Murray Schaefer’s World Soundscape Project. Schaefer developed a helpful list of considerations for listening to nothing happening (“foreground, background, contour, rhythm, silence, density, space and volume”), adding to the experience of how environmental sound can be perceived, while introducing new terminology like Clairaudience, Morphology, Schizophonia, Sound Romance and my favourite, Jet Pause (“Voluntary and habitual suspension of speech or other activity during the overpass of low flying aircraft near busy airports”). With a team of artists and recordists including Barry Truax and Hildegard Westerkamp (still active today as artists, lecturers and hosts of group Soundwalks), their landmark work was the aforementioned Vancouver Soundscape.

One particular criticism of the field via Lopez and Thomas B.W. Bailey is that it

seems largely holistic, adhering to a certain morality; unsurprising since it originated on the Left Coast during the ‘60s/‘70s, carrying an environmentalist’s view of the world into the sonic realm, almost Waldenesque in assigning higher value to “natural” rather than mechanical sounds. Nowadays, many contemporary sound artists seem intent on moving beyond the equation of “machines/cars/planes/traffic = noise/pollution = bad”, insisting on creating different criteria to measure whether certain sounds should be indexed as “noise” (the now equally-saturated genre of Noise, from Whitehouse to Merzbow to Lasse Marhaug, along with its own codified aesthetic framework and micro-genre squabbles merits another article altogether). Like the volume of the rock gesture, noise can be harnessed into form.

In a time where smog-alerts accompany the daily weather report, neither side seems wholly right or wrong; urban life has become harsher, and who wants to inhale gridlock? And so, most urbanites tend to automatically tune the city out. When you focus on it, similar to noticing the lack of constellations on view thanks to urban light pollution, it’s difficult to not hear: it’s an orchestral thrum, or, in spots, physically invasive. When amplified, even moreso: anyone who’s gone on a recording hunt/soundwalk knows that one of the main enemies of field recording is the sound of a passing car. Still, rather than being an unwanted nuisance (a tree full of birds chirping merrily outside your window at dawn can equally serve as an irritant) it’s a matter of how one deals with unwanted environmental stimulus. Perhaps one of the reasons why everyone walks with their head down fiddling with their mobile device while plugged into little white earbuds now is out of a sense of self-defense. The city-dweller’s body hasn’t evolved and adapted to the bombardment of ongoing stimulus, so our toys act as prophylactics. In spaces where taking public transit or walking down a street where every third person seems to have their hustle on (hello there, Commercial Drive/Granville), tuning out becomes necessary when you’re just trying to get from point A to B.

 

TL/DR:

Looking at Schaefer and critics like Lopez, both have their points: any perceived rift is a matter of different aesthetic and even moral sensibilities, with an appreciation for idyllic quietude on the one side and the texture of cacophony on the other, both with their own potential. Noise, like most other sound phenomena around us- happens whether we want it to or not: phonography in particular provides a useful assessment of our relationship to our environment, asking for critical involvement in all of the considerations mentioned above. By isolating particular sound objects and events, or by allowing the background to become foreground, one chooses to hear their world analytically, or with pure pleasure in mind. The aim is engagement.

 

V.

My recent shift in locale from East Vancouver to the quieter and less-hectic ancient capital of Nara, Japan made me hyper-aware of the scale of sound and noise:

When navigating a new city/country, the senses re-engage with the body as it moves through unfamiliar spaces; a different operating system overrides when you can’t read the signage and don’t instinctively know North from South. Everyday sounds stand out: ambulance sirens here are different, each train line has it’s particular trill. Instead of Harleys, biker kids roll in swarms of motor-scooters that sound like weed-whackers. Cicadas, ravens, Tenrikyo followers clapping their hyoshigi blocks as a calling card, the sweet potato vendor coming down the alley singing through a loudspeaker. I’ve made a habit of documenting my new audio environment while it still sounds fresh.

On day trips into Osaka, I imagine the bustle of shopping arcades like Dotonbori and Ebisubashi to be an acoustic ecologist’s nightmare. For me, the sensory overload is a pleasurable buzz: the strobe-pulse of faces, neon and LCD screens, the competing soundtracks of crammed-together shops (J-pop vs K-pop vs metal vs dubstep vs techno, all simultaneous), barkers, conversation and ringtones, while everybody manages to keep to themselves. It’s a kind of “Gastronomy of the ear”, to paraphrase Honore de Balzac. Until it becomes annoying, I’ll keep coming back to it.

Check:

Ocean of Sound, Haunted Weather and Sinister Resonance – David Toop

Retromania: Pop Culture’s Addiction to its Own Past – Simon Reynolds

Schizophonia, and Environmental Sound Matter – Francisco Lopez

MicroBionic: Radical Electronic Music and Sound Art in the 21st Century – Thomas

B.W. Bailey

A Sound Education and The Tuning of the World (The Soundscape) – R. Murray Schaefer

Noise: The Political Economy of Music – Jacques Attali

See also: Walter Murch.

Thanks to crys cole for her invaluable input.

 

Christopher Olsen (@standardgrey), a recent graduate of Emily Carr University,  is a Canadian writer and artist based in Nara, Japan. A frequent contributor to Border Crossings, his critical work has also appeared in Colour, Vancouver Review, C Magazine and The Capilano Review. Recent sound work can be heard on Framework:Afield and Instagrambient: 25 Sonic Postcards, and he has lectured on sound matters at Center A and the Or Gallery in Vancouver. His obsessive musical hoarding tendencies are aired out at www.solarflares.tumblr.com.