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, we’ll be treated to a concert featuring ASAE member composers, performers and special guests.

Saturday (7/10) - Head “out of town” for an afternoon soundwalk in Miller Woods, at the Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore. After the dunes soundwalk, it’s back to the city for another group dinner followed by a Chicago nightlife soundwalk. This day’s events should provide plenty of opportunities for informal conversation and networking among members.

Sunday (7/11) - ASAE members lead a workshop for children and families. A late afternoon concert and closing reception will follow. ASAE members from New York, San Francisco, the Midwest, Southwest and beyond will present their works.

The ASAE - Listening for the Future

During the course of these events, the ASAE’s governing body and leaders from all the regional chapters will be meeting to brainstorm for the future of the organization. We will be soliciting input from you - our members - as we embark on this important work. Please plan to share any ideas, concerns or questions about the organization that you might have.

Practicalities

All events, including both concerts, the ‘Citizen Sound’ symposium, the soundwalks and the workshop are free for ASAE members (current for 2010). All meals are pay-your-own, but we’ll be making advance reservations so will ask you to register. Transportation between venues, including the Dunes soundwalk, will be via public transit. These costs are not covered by the ASAE, but we will plan to meet and travel as a group to the Dunes soundwalk.

We’re working now to put together a list of hotels and travel resources for those of you attending from afar. Homestays with Chicago MSAE and WLP members may also be possible.

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.

http://mwsae.org/?p=561

Thanks again for your support of the ASAE - we look forward to meeting you in Chicago.

Sincerely,
Listening for the Future Organizing Committee:
Eric Leonardson, Chair
Michelle Nagai, Andrea Polli

Assisted by: Jamie Davis, Jesse Seay

Listening for the Future is organized by the American Society for Acoustic Ecology, and hosted by the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology and the World Listening Project. Sponsors include Vocalo.org (89.5 FM), The National Park Service and Columbia College.

You can listen to the program on the CBC website.

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):

A sweet set from 9/1/05

Listen to the Orchive!

More about OrcaLab

“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!!

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

Sound Devices SD722 with DSM-1S

While recording with the DSM-1S, you don’t monitor with headphones, but with the mics positioned just in front of the ears, which took some getting used to. On balance though, I like the freedom of just listening to the soundscape without electronic filtering or amplification while recording.  You can also record with these mics by attaching them to a pair of glasses, but then you don’t get wind protection, which is a necessity in most environmental recording.

I’ll be posting some recordings made with the mics later including my son singing with a  325-member children’s choir; the McKenzie and Eel rivers; a beaver pond in upstate New York; a train passing through Eugene in the night and more.

The sound in this post was recorded at my sister’s land in Mendocino County, CA. She has a hummingbird feeder that draws a buzzing, careening, frenzied flock of birds non-stop to sip its nectar. I am standing below the feeder in the early morning while my family quietly putters around in the background making coffee.

[See post to listen to audio]

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.

Click here to view the embedded video.