The American Society for Acoustic Ecology is pleased to announce ASAE Chicago: Listening for the Future.
This is the first-ever national gathering of the ASAE membership and the general public. Hosted by the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and the World Listening Project, Listening for the Future will take place from July 9-11, 2010. We think it’s going to be a fantastic three days, with plenty of information and inspiration to go around. We hope you will join us at this landmark event.
Additional details will be posted on the Listening for the Future web page. Please bookmark and check back often as we’ll be making frequent updates from here forward. A registration page will be posted early next week, along with locations of all venues, maps, schedules etc.
Event Highlights
Friday (7/9) - Friday (7/9) - ‘Citizen Sound’ symposium featuring a wine and cheese reception, introductions to each of the ASAE chapters, and presentations by leaders in Chicago’s cultural and advocacy scene. Featured guests include Lou Mallozzi, Executive Director of Experimental Sound Studio and architect Graham Balkany of the Gropius in Chicago Coalition. A media lounge, where guests can sample CDs and peruse publications by participants, performers and ASAE members, will be open all night. Following dinner at a local eatery, [Read more]
Laurie Anderson just keeps on amazing: she’s written a 20-minute piece for dogs, to be performed outside the Sydney Opera House this week as part of a music festival she’s curating with long-time partner Lou Reed. It’s billed as “an interspecies social gathering,” and will be largely inaudible to humans who accompany the audience to the show. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, over the past decade Laurie and Lou have created music for their rat terrier, Lolabelle, who “likes things with a lot of smoothness but with beats in them,” according to Anderson, “‘Things with voices and lots of complicated high-end stuff. Chk-chk-chk-chk-chk … that kind of stuff.” (I’m sure that any dog who lives with these two has reliably average canine musical taste!) The concert will be brief, since dogs’ aesthetic attention span is relatively short. ”Actually, I think a lot of shows for people would be improved if they were 20 minutes,” says Anderson. “Shows are too long - my own included.”
Last fall, the CBC program Inside the Music featured a wonderful hour-long exploration of field recording, produced by noted National Geographic writer Wade Davis. The people he chose to focus on were a Who’s Who of EarthEar artists and friends: Lisa Walker, Doug Quin, David Rothenberg, and Hildegard Westerkamp. You can’t do much better than that!
David Rothenberg just sent me the link to this video on YouTube, one of the fruits of his recent participation in an Arctic Circle artists’ residency aboard the good ship Noorderlicht. It’s got some great water/ice sounds with hypnotic imagery, compelling polar bear footage, and of course David’s clarinet and spoken-word reflections, on the north, the self, the world…
Paul Spong and Helena Symonds are legends in the field of whale research; since the early 1970’s they’ve dedicated themselves to studying orcas from their independent lab on an island between Vancouver Island and the mainland. Over those many years, they’ve accumulated 20,000 hours of tapes, which are now being digitized and cleaned up (to remove hiss and other noise and make the orca calls more prominent) by George Tzanetakis of the University of Victoria. A recent article in the Toronto Globe and Mail focuses on Tzanetakis’ work, which is being posted online for researchers and curious listeners as the Orchive. The entire collection isn’t online yet, but there’s plenty!
Those of us who know the pleasures of cueing up Newport Jazz or good ol’ Grateful Dead shows from online taper archives like Archive.org and Bill Graham’s Wolfgang’s Vault will be familiar with the scope of this project: right now I’m nearly half-way through a 45-minute “set” from 9/1/05 known on the Orchive as Tape 449A. As with jam band and jazz taper archives, the quality is decent though not crystal clear, creating a great background stream of pleasurable audio, ebbing and flowing from quiet and calm to more active, interspersed with moments of truly exciting interplay and melodic joy. The audio is presented with a basic spectrogram, and even field notes (the scientific version of Dick Latvala’s show notes):
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.”
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 fromSonic 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 handoff.
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.
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.
![[Lawrence Lucier/Getty Images]](http://earthear.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/laurieloudog.jpg "laurieloudog")
