Author: Isaac Arundel

Earshot, Library in Residence

Lawrence Abu Hamdan’s masterfully minimal yet powerful exhibition at the new art space Ibraaz in central London, a grand multistorey building off Mortimer Street, perhaps a welcome rest from the busy consumerist regents and Oxford Street unrest. Ibraaz is a bright calm space welcoming attention and focused exploration of its many current exhibitions. Hamdan and his team at Earshot have created an installation in Ibraaz’s library space suggesting their commitment to educating. Entering this exhibition space greats you with a cold and sobering feeling, a change from Ibraaz’s sunlit grand stairs. The room is darkened, highlighted by an immediately obvious section of interactive computer screens and a bleach white curtain covered in a projected image of a sonic spectrogram as is in relation with Earshot’s practice. This space is not particularly scenographically obvious, it requires and welcomes a level of focused interaction to immerse yourself and reveal its contextual meanings. Immediately listening in you are washed over by the multichannel speaker installation and almost automatically driven to take a seat directly in the middle. This powerful composition of field recordings and earwitness recreations are detailed in a description on the wall, accompanied by various information leaflets littered throughout the installation. The sound of a drone motors above and grants a particularly powerful feeling of being observed, the sound of heavy shipping authenticates the acoustic-ecological effect of the industrial military complex on the environment. The computer monitors act as an interactive demonstration of some of Earshot’s key investigations, a sonic demonstration of the LRAD used in Serbia, A contextual analysis of that drone sound recorded before an Israeli attack on journalists. The space feels educational; its architecture directly lacks the visual and focuses on the idea of using the ear. Earshot’s work here asks questions and then allows the audience to discover and answer them themselves; it’s a powerful break from a classical installation and creates an environment in which the entire room focuses on audience participation to learn from it.

Audio Essay Idea Progress

‘What Does the Forest Think of Us’

This audio essay is aiming to explore acoustic ecology between Human actions and the environment, also exploring the social ecology of inter Human relations along with Human nature relations. The audio essay script will be written in a first-person account from the perspective of characters created from natural organisms like trees and wildlife. It will explore the effect of the industrial complex, deforestation on itself using socially relatable methods. Also, the essay will explore the impact the Human race has on each other from the perspective of nature, violence, racism. This essay will aim to add academic references through the use of a second voice (maybe digitally altered, recorded differently).

Sonic Tools

This essay will use field recordings and sounds from archival material as descriptive aids, maybe recording the voice over in different locations / processing the voice to immerse the listener within the contextual spaces. Using synthesised sounds / crafted sonics to explore different meanings.

Progress

A deeper exploration into this idea will be performed before the next blog post, aiming to find academically backed accounts of these world problems.

Memory Based Listening Exercise

In week three we were asked to bring in an object or sound that related us to a personal memory with which we could discuss about with the class. When moving into my second-year accommodation I accidently brought up with me a carrier bag full of objects found at my local hometown beach. This is a space I spend every moment I can at and for its somewhere completely isolated and shut off from the rest of the world. This bag, consisting of mostly driftwood, rocks and dried seaweed by chance made its way up with me in London so I thought choosing something from there would be easily recognisable and simple to talk about.  The specific object I chose was a small section of washed up reed, fascinatingly light and filled with a sort of marrow of soft textured lining that could be moulded. This stick of sorts with a length of about ten centre mitres was covered in small ink droplet looking markings giving it a unique appearance. There was no particular reason I chose this specific one, just as a way to bring them all with me. In class we discussed how it related to a memory of mine, and I explained how the object ties me to that beach. Next, I described the sounds that appear in that place, detailing the movement of waves and how factors like weather and wind changed the sonic environment to a completely new degree. I also shared my favourite beach related tone which is the thought that upon each step you take when walking across pebbles or sand you start a chain reaction of bumping each grain into the other and with that a resulting sound that gets smaller and smaller. This to me highlights the ecological interaction we have with the environment and how everything we do affects the place we are in.

Related Sonic Sculpture Experiment

I composed a piece a few months ago called The Beach Has Ears which was an imagined sound environment created over a twelve minute field recording of the surf on that beach. I wanted to provide a sort of surrealist account of how I imagined this and used percussive elements and random objects to compose over top. This memory task and also my progress in the instruments and interactivity course elective inspired me to use these materials to create a sonic sculpture that would play the sound of that piece but also visually resemble the physical environment it was meant to be. I will save the technical details for that other class, but I used the rocks and driftwood to make a sculpture on which I placed an old guitar amp circuit with a speaker and also the Bela microcomputer platform. In Pure Data I made a patch from the irregular length stems of that composition and set them to loop indefinitely which created a way of constantly changing the composition over time. This in the end allowed me to play my composition through the low-fi speaker creating the effect of listening to that beach on a windy or rough day.

The Beach Has Ears. Beach Fodder, Orange Microamp Circuit, Bela Mini

Pure Data looped Patch

Narration Task

In week two we took on a short narration task in which we explored the building with the intention of finding somewhere then commenting on a sense of place, exploring its sonic environment and noting our relationships with it. I ended up joining a follow student which led us to record a conversation we had at the very top of the tower block, this conversation was not an analysis or reflection of that space over its sonority but a genuine discussion over regular life related nuances. Nice in a way but missing the point of the task. The top of the tower block is however strangely quiet, up away from the heart of Elephant and Castle. This I suppose once exaggerated removes all of the feeling of place, flaying away the city sounds the higher up you go and leaving nothing tangible enough to make out where you are without looking out the window. This task although failed by us definitely created an enjoyable thought experiment especially once introduced to the narrations form other class members. My notable favourite was Simons’ walk to the shops and back in which he provided a raw account of the un-personable experience of talking to yourself through crowds of fellow students and the general public. He notes the loud unwelcome sounds of construction nearby, transport vehicles and the chatter of other people. Simon also explored his sense of self and place by audibly describing the reactions he was getting as he moved through the space, as his narration was unfiltered it came out very powerful but also with great sense of humour and shows his personality well as preserving a sense of normality and not over dramatising the task.

Thinking Sounds by Marcel Cobussen

This blog explores the difference in meaning of both sound studies and sonic studies. It starts by analysing Shafer’s influence on the term and how he argues in high favour of an equality of acoustic design within fields such as urban development and architecture. This here is an important aspect of the sonic world that is often overlooked, when thought about it brings to light the acoustic ecology of life and sound and how unwanted noise is often overpowering in the world. Cobussen then explains the definition of sound studies by detailing how multidisciplinary the field can be from philosophy to architecture and medical studies and shows us that sound studies are about the study of the material role of sound in this world. He then contrasts this with a definition of sonic studies which focuses on the production and consumption of sound and with it how it guides human behaviour. Cobussen mentions how this idea of sonic studies is tied to exploring decolonisation and how western identities historically have prioritised the visual over listening.

The audio essay is a new topic for me, at first, I thought of it as a critical academic paper in narrated text form using sound environments as descriptive aids to better immerse the listener in the topic. After our first seminar and personally listening to ‘On Vanishing land’ and others on Hyperdubs’ Flatline label I immediately realised the almost fictitious imaginative approach that lies with term ‘audio essay’. These works stick to a given baseline topic but explore deeper distracting themes using soundscapes that overpower and undercut the voice. This creates a duality within a piece that no longer explores either academia or storytelling and requires a new concept of attention to absorb both together. This pedagogical approach makes audio essays harder listening than an audio paper or other species of sonic literature which reduces its accessibility as a listener who may only be interested in its surface level theme. The audio essay is also attractive for those reasons as they are a more of an immersive auditory experience which allows a listener to fall in and out of realisation with the baseline theme and explore others that are brought up within the soundscapes or varying vocal tone and topics.

This unit creates an opportunity for me to explore and learn a new topic which I’m most excited for. I personally think now with my new understanding of an audio essay my intentions lie closer towards an audio paper as it will allow me to explore a research topic critically using my favoured academic structuring. Though I wouldn’t consider myself a sound designer or composer it might also be beneficial to push myself towards exploring an audio essay as a way to try new methodology out. There are three main themes I would currently like to explore. Firstly, an investigative journalism approach towards a topic could be interesting for me as I find myself quite interested in this field and have been wanting an opportunity to explore it further. The second is an ecological / natural science exploration of a space or natural process, this could align well within an audio essay as I could introduce sub-themes or ideas using more abstract auditory scapes that contrast the main argument. My last idea would be to do a sonic anthropological exploration of a topic which explores the musicology of sounds and instruments. This could also be interesting in an audio essay as the more fluid creative freedom would allow me to investigate socio-political ideas within the main theme. This unit is exciting for me as it provides a new format to learn and understand as well as giving me the opportunity to explore a new topic which I mentioned earlier. In the meantime until my next blog post, I will investigate my three topic areas closer and explore how they would contextually fit within an audio essay or paper.