It’s great to feel and hear the essence of EarthEar emerging once again, after a couple years of rest.  From the start, my inspiration when I formed EarthEar was to provide a forum within which this compelling creative medium might find a wider audience.  Central to this goal was the extensive context we added to the normal “CD sales” format: 8 pages of background info in the printed EarthEar Catalog, a 40-page booklet in our flagship Dreams of Gaia double-disc initial release, pages of reading, science, and news items on the website.  All this aimed to provide a broad – and diverse – sense of the artistic impulses at play in the field, and to inspire each of us to listen more actively in the places we live.  As EarthEar relaunches in more streamlined form, the EarthEar Sound Blog is the place where this conversation will continue.  In words, sounds, and pictures, the community of sound artists and field recordists that I’ve gotten to know in the past 15 years will share their thoughts and sounds, and we invite readers and listeners to join in with comments and suggestions.  Bookmark this page, or subscribe to a feed; we sure hope to perk up your ears on a regular basis!

Thanks to EarthEar’s Facebook community, I was just clued into the Cooroora Institute, a wonderful initiative out of Australia, centered on improvised and ceremonial engagement with the natural world, in all art media.  Check out their website (linked above) and their various writings; I highly recommend Tamsin Kerr’s Listen Like a River.  Here’s a taste:

“Yet, humans have greater qualities than just a sense of hearing. We have a creative ability to step outside ourselves and imagine an expanded future. We have ways to listen to the world; not just hear its noises. We might listen like a river. Listening like a river offers possibilities, seldom grasped, for new cultural metaphors and new ways forward. Margaret Somerville says: ‘Babble is … a language that is … visionary and revelatory, closer to the landscape, allied to the sounds of streams and birds.’ (Somerville, et al, 1994: 194). Perhaps it is only possible to place think, to imagine landscape embeddedness, through succumbing to wild thinking and the babble of rivers.

“Deep within its waters, a river holds the memory of sounds across both time and place. River flows embrace the sound of brook, creek, and stream journeys as well as seas and oceans. Sounds travel well in water; distance meaningless to a river’s hearing. The crystal waters of its birthplace abound with young life, while pelicans swoosh down suddenly with beaks agape at the river’s mouth. Mangrove buds unfurl, root, grow, and die amidst the lifetime swirls and eddies that combine fresh and brine. And from far across the ocean comes the clear singing of whales. Human sounds above and apart from the waters are distorted and remote. Travel distance is a human concept - land and air based; this is not a river’s reality. The clearest sounds remain always within its waters. And its waters are everywhere all the time, flowing constantly from mountain to mangrove, from creek to ocean.”

Now, go read the whole thing!!

Check out Ear Room, which does one thing very well: talk at length with sound artists about their work.  The most recent post features Eric Leonardon, with Andrea Polli and Loren Chasse among previous artists featured.  Francisco Lopez and many others are yet to come….

Lisa Walker, one of the artists that EarthEar has worked with for years, has begun blogging at her site, Grooved Whale.  She’s mostly posting short reflections on her explorations of music, and how music may link or differentiate species, often with questions to spur us to reflect ourselves on these themes.  A very enjoyable new online voice!

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My sound partner Catherine Girardeau and I recently purchased a DSM microphone from Sonic Studios and have recorded quite a few soundscapes and effects. The Smithsonian institution’s National Museum of the American Indian hired us create a pair of soundwalks exploring the landscape and architecture of the Museum grounds on the mall in Washington DC. We wanted to create an immersive audio experience for headphone listeners and we thought the DSM mics would be a good place to start. The price was right and mics came highly recommended by soundscapers we trust, including Aaron Ximm and Steven Feld, as well as Catherine’s Public Radio Colleague, Michael Johnson.

Picking up the mics from Leonard

We called Leonard Lombardo at Sonic Studios to order the DSM-1S with the windscreen ear buds and power supply. As it turned out, we were planning to drive by Leonard’s neck of the woods in Oregon to hear our son sing with the San Francisco Boys  chorus in Eugene, so we made a plan to meet Leonard and pick up the mics in person.  He met us in the parking lot of a gas station Sutherlin, Oregon and we did a brief hand off.

In general, we have been very happy with the DSM mics.  We paired them with our Sound Devices SD-722 which makes a very compact and efficient  recording package.

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Stills from The Ground Falls Away: expansion, 2008, 2-channel video and sound installation, continuous loop/ variable length.

Los Angeles based artist Andrew Freeman and I installed a new piece titled The Ground Falls Away: expansion, at Las Cienegas Projects on October 14th. Link over the the gallery here. Andrew is also exhibiting photographs from a different body of work in a new show in Los Angeles at Sam Lee Gallery  Locating Landscapes: New Strategies, New Technologies. (Lee Gallery will be uploading images soon.)

Our generous hosts and partners in The Ground Falls Away: expansion are la Asociación Panamericana para la Conservación. Nestor Correa, Andrew Carver and the APPC staff have created a wonderful platform where the arts and sciences exchange ideas. Our many thanks to you! Link over to the APPC.

From the Las Cienegas Projects press release:

The Ground Falls Away: expansion, a video and sound installation that looks at the terrestrial movement of conservation and economic expansion displayed in the landscape of Panama’s Canal Zone. Recorded on location in one of the world’s largest construction sites, artists Andrew Freeman and Jay Needham explore the physical and cultural conditions of the canal-zone as the metaphoric hourglass of the Americas. In this initial offering from their ongoing work in the region, the “expansion” project presents a fluid focal point for the artists; the installation points to a commercial and ecological zone where multinational pressures conspire to unearth the inevitable collision between global conditions and the environment. Produced in a partnership with the Panamanian NGO, la Asociación Panamericana para la Conservación, the work examines a newly widened canal that harbors a myriad of consequences in the wake of its prior existence as part of a transnational US military landscape.

Video from the Las Cienegas installation.

http://www.vimeo.com/7227313

This past summer I had the pleasure of traveling to New Caledonia (an island nation northeast of Australia, between New Zealand and New Guinea), where I was part of a team that was developing a methodology and protocol for remote acoustic sensing to help monitor populations of the Kagu, a ground-nesting bird, and eventually other endangered species. So far, so good using the Wildlife Acoustics Song Meters and Song Scope software.  I’d like to share some photos and sounds from the trip.

My colleague Sophie Rouys is a conservation biologist and heads up the Kagu Recovery Plan for New Caledonia; she recorded some really close up calls one morning in the park at Riviere Bleue. They call, usually in groups, for anywhere between 5 minutes and an hour at dawn. They’re pretty silent the rest of the time, except for clucking sounds when male and female switch off at the nest and the occasional display.

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Below the fold are some of Sophie’s pictures of Kagu, and a five-minute soundscape of dusk in the Parc de Riviere Bleue… [Read more]

Before moving to New Mexico, I worked at a multimedia studio in Minneapolis and one of the projects I was involved in there was to create an hour-long mix of environmental recordings intended to give the impression of moving through adjacent spaces.  It was a relaxation CD that some corporation was paying for to give to their employees.  The basic idea was that the listener was supposed to feel like they were walking across a field, through a forest and down to the beach.  I never knew what job these people did [Read more]