...with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/index.html[26/08/2013 1:00:26 PM]

resounding australian silence | a brief history of sound(scapes)it goes echoing | selective hearing | folding the map away

Silence—an absence. Australia—‘the silent continent’.

Silence—scientifically impossible, subjectively insufferable. Australia—“It was a silent void at the far end of the world. In the act of clearing it, civilisedmen were bringing sound and light to the solitude.”

sounds:alan lamb | wogarno (1:33, australian sound design project , 1999) | play

Like wine spreading across a tablecloth, the sound and light of Europeancivilisation slowly eked its way into the ‘silent’ Australian interior. Thestains that remain, however, are blood red, for this preternatural ‘silence’is partly a euphemism: “it is easier by far to place, not Aborigines, butsilence on the far side of the frontier.” But the experience of silencewas also partly the ignorance of the pioneer. With eyes and ears attunedonly to the familiar, they were shocked by new sights and sounds. Thiswas a failure of sensory and intellectual assimilation—and a failurewhich sought to overcome its alienation through violence against bothman and nature.

If this history—and genocide—begins with the dull thud of an axe ,how are we to capture Australia’s echoes and understand theirresonances?

An attuned ear could have listened to the sounds the land emitted. But‘sound,’ the perceived positive to silence’s negative, is so oftenunderstood only to be the human and the ‘beautiful’. By the twentiethcentury, however, an aesthetic appreciation and artistic apprehension ofthe diverse sounds in the world becomes an interest entertained byhundreds of practitioners around the world. Composers of soundscapeart draw on everyday sounds and other ‘latent’ sound environments tocreate their works.

The field of soundscape art is a fertile one in Australia. It yields manifoldstyles and approaches; manifold engagements with local landscapes aswell as transnational spaces. These soundscapes offer the sounds ofcities, towns and badlands; of empty drums, afternoon barbecues andcicadas in the sun. Their provenance is outside language—or, perhaps,better put, it is the global language of sounds, of the world’s rhythms andtones stressed and emphasised.

As sounds taken from the world, processed and sent back out as artisticworks, these recordings bear always the load of being an ‘interpretation’;they are framed and edited, at once contingent and controlled. They area kind of aural entropy—a play of sounds in a system closed off bymicrophones, computers and artistic endeavour. Claims to realism donot always acknowledge this. Such determinedly realist works erase thehuman, artistic act while at the same time positing the resultant artisticartefact as worthy of attention (a kind of immodest modesty then: ‘Ibring you an artistic work and I wash my hands of it—but do you like it?’). Yet others put their action inside the aural frame (footsteps, the ruffleof a coat), admitting a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for thearts; or, indeed, a thoroughly modernist underlining of artistic

Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999) Source: Australian Sound Design Project

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...with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

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production.

Lawrence English and Alan Lamb, the central artists discussed here, arerespected figures in the Australian sound art scene. Their works lead usto some of the different ways landscape and soundscape are imagined inAustralia. English’s works cross the tangled lines of flight inexperimental music: he runs a respected record label issuing local andinternational releases, curates at the Brisbane Powerhouse and JudithWright Centre of Contemporary Arts, collaborates with artists fromaround the world on one-off projects—and composes intricate, distilledfield recordings in Australian and international settings. Alan Lamb, aScottish ex-pat, is much less prolific and more singular in his focus. Hebuilds large instruments which stage an interface between culture andnature. His so-called “Faraway Wind Organ”, for instance, was a sonicreservoir, tapped into whenever inspiration struck—and then left to humits own unpredictable and melancholy tune. Other projects by Lamb haveused the landscape as a kind of base for sonic experiments between windand wire, water and sun, wind and rock (as seen in the Wogarnoproject).

It could be said that Lamb is to poetry as English is to prose: Lamb is animpressionistic artist, concerned with a compressed but sonorousexposition of both colonialism’s desolate remnants in the Australianoutback and the very landscapes which made those colonists turn andrun; English is interested too in the remnants of a society, but, in thework I consider here (Ghost Towns [Room 40, 2004]), his concern iswith the ravages of the post-industrial economy on Australia’s ‘GhostTowns’. As such, his is at once a work infused with socio-politicalspecificity and a generalised sense of the (global) ‘field recording’aesthetic. If Lamb and English point to the richness of interpretations ofspace in Australian sound, it is for this reason that their differences arestressed here.

Using these two artists as examples, the work here takes as its startingpoint an observation by Ros Bandt:

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes oflistening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be inthe temporal continuum of place. By participating in theauditory moment, the continuously changing present canbe more fully known through experience. The presentbecomes the past in a moment and activates memorythereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. Whatare we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to taketime to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilisedwhite society. Listening requires a sharing of temporalspace; it is a communal experience very much defined bythe sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a placeto listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge asthey are articulated by sound.

Across the pages of this site I hope to elucidate this connection betweensite, sound and memory by looking to the ways that those auralexperiences are framed in works of sound art. There is a suggestivenarrative of exploration—as indicated by the order of menu items above(thus beginning with the history of soundscape as an art)—but thisjourney is open to redefinition. In line with the potential of a browser-driven narrative, important concepts are referenced and linked to othersections when they are fundamental to the discussion.

See J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian SoundDesign Project , <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,1994, accessed: 5th November, 2005.

M. Cathcart, “The Silent Continent,” in Adam Shoemaker (ed.), A Sea Change: AustralianWriting and Photography, Sydney: SOCOG, 1998, p94.

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...with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

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M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95. See also P. Carter (“Ambiguous Traces,” AustralianSound Design Project , <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>,June, 2001, accessed: 5th November, 2005) who notes, “one expression of the fate thatovertook the Australian Aborigines who came into contact with the first settlers was that theycould not be misstaken for somebody else. Their silence was a direct consequence of theimpossibility of remaining deaf to them.”

See P. Carter (op. cit.) who points to “the exclamation of the white settler who, onhearing a cock crow after days bushed in the Gippsland forest, cried out, ‘Thank God, anEnglish voice at last!’… [Such] hearers suffer from a form of auditory agoraphobia, a loss ofenvironmental resonance.”

M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95.

As Antonia Pont writes in her interesting online project, (“Moving Listening: A PoeticCycle” Refractory (online),<http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/stateofplay/articles/APont.html>, February, 2005,accessed: 27th October, 2005), “Listening = Hearing + Intention.”

B. Truax (Acoustic Communication, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984) firstprovided this simple definition.

R. Bandt, “Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, An Audible Polyphony,”Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/NationPaper.html>, June, 2001a,accessed: 5th November, 2005.

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Untitled Document

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Silence—an absence. Australia—‘the silent continent’.

Silence—scientifically impossible, subjectively insufferable. Australia—“It was a silent void at the far end of the world. In the act of clearing it, civilisedmen were bringing sound and light to the solitude.”

sounds:alan lamb | wogarno (1:33, australian sound design project , 1999) | play

Like wine spreading across a tablecloth, the sound and light of Europeancivilisation slowly eked its way into the ‘silent’ Australian interior. Thestains that remain, however, are blood red, for this preternatural ‘silence’is partly a euphemism: “it is easier by far to place, not Aborigines, butsilence on the far side of the frontier.” But the experience of silencewas also partly the ignorance of the pioneer. With eyes and ears attunedonly to the familiar, they were shocked by new sights and sounds. Thiswas a failure of sensory and intellectual assimilation—and a failurewhich sought to overcome its alienation through violence against bothman and nature.

If this history—and genocide—begins with the dull thud of an axe ,how are we to capture Australia’s echoes and understand theirresonances?

An attuned ear could have listened to the sounds the land emitted. But‘sound,’ the perceived positive to silence’s negative, is so oftenunderstood only to be the human and the ‘beautiful’. By the twentiethcentury, however, an aesthetic appreciation and artistic apprehension ofthe diverse sounds in the world becomes an interest entertained byhundreds of practitioners around the world. Composers of soundscapeart draw on everyday sounds and other ‘latent’ sound environments tocreate their works.

The field of soundscape art is a fertile one in Australia. It yields manifoldstyles and approaches; manifold engagements with local landscapes aswell as transnational spaces. These soundscapes offer the sounds ofcities, towns and badlands; of empty drums, afternoon barbecues andcicadas in the sun. Their provenance is outside language—or, perhaps,better put, it is the global language of sounds, of the world’s rhythms andtones stressed and emphasised.

As sounds taken from the world, processed and sent back out as artisticworks, these recordings bear always the load of being an ‘interpretation’;they are framed and edited, at once contingent and controlled. They area kind of aural entropy—a play of sounds in a system closed off bymicrophones, computers and artistic endeavour. Claims to realism donot always acknowledge this. Such determinedly realist works erase thehuman, artistic act while at the same time positing the resultant artisticartefact as worthy of attention (a kind of immodest modesty then: ‘Ibring you an artistic work and I wash my hands of it—but do you like it?’). Yet others put their action inside the aural frame (footsteps, the ruffleof a coat), admitting a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for thearts; or, indeed, a thoroughly modernist underlining of artisticproduction.

Lawrence English and Alan Lamb, the central artists discussed here, arerespected figures in the Australian sound art scene. Their works lead usto some of the different ways landscape and soundscape are imagined inAustralia. English’s works cross the tangled lines of flight inexperimental music: he runs a respected record label issuing local andinternational releases, curates at the Brisbane Powerhouse and JudithWright Centre of Contemporary Arts, collaborates with artists from

Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999) Source: Australian Sound Design Project

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Untitled Document

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around the world on one-off projects—and composes intricate, distilledfield recordings in Australian and international settings. Alan Lamb, aScottish ex-pat, is much less prolific and more singular in his focus. Hebuilds large instruments which stage an interface between culture andnature. His so-called “Faraway Wind Organ”, for instance, was a sonicreservoir, tapped into whenever inspiration struck—and then left to humits own unpredictable and melancholy tune. Other projects by Lamb haveused the landscape as a kind of base for sonic experiments between windand wire, water and sun, wind and rock (as seen in the Wogarnoproject).

It could be said that Lamb is to poetry as English is to prose: Lamb is animpressionistic artist, concerned with a compressed but sonorousexposition of both colonialism’s desolate remnants in the Australianoutback and the very landscapes which made those colonists turn andrun; English is interested too in the remnants of a society, but, in thework I consider here (Ghost Towns [Room 40, 2004]), his concern iswith the ravages of the post-industrial economy on Australia’s ‘GhostTowns’. As such, his is at once a work infused with socio-politicalspecificity and a generalised sense of the (global) ‘field recording’aesthetic. If Lamb and English point to the richness of interpretations ofspace in Australian sound, it is for this reason that their differences arestressed here.

Using these two artists as examples, the work here takes as its startingpoint an observation by Ros Bandt:

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes oflistening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be inthe temporal continuum of place. By participating in theauditory moment, the continuously changing present canbe more fully known through experience. The presentbecomes the past in a moment and activates memorythereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. Whatare we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to taketime to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilisedwhite society. Listening requires a sharing of temporalspace; it is a communal experience very much defined bythe sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a placeto listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge asthey are articulated by sound.

Across the pages of this site I hope to elucidate this connection betweensite, sound and memory by looking to the ways that those auralexperiences are framed in works of sound art. There is a suggestivenarrative of exploration—as indicated by the order of menu items above(thus beginning with the history of soundscape as an art)—but thisjourney is open to redefinition. In line with the potential of a browser-driven narrative, important concepts are referenced and linked to othersections when they are fundamental to the discussion.

See J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian SoundDesign Project , <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,1994, accessed: 5th November, 2005.

M. Cathcart, “The Silent Continent,” in Adam Shoemaker (ed.), A Sea Change: AustralianWriting and Photography, Sydney: SOCOG, 1998, p94.

M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95. See also P. Carter (“Ambiguous Traces,” AustralianSound Design Project , <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>,June, 2001, accessed: 5th November, 2005) who notes, “one expression of the fate thatovertook the Australian Aborigines who came into contact with the first settlers was that theycould not be misstaken for somebody else. Their silence was a direct consequence of theimpossibility of remaining deaf to them.”

See P. Carter (op. cit.) who points to “the exclamation of the white settler who, onhearing a cock crow after days bushed in the Gippsland forest, cried out, ‘Thank God, anEnglish voice at last!’… [Such] hearers suffer from a form of auditory agoraphobia, a loss ofenvironmental resonance.”

M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95.

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Untitled Document

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/textbody.html[26/08/2013 1:00:27 PM]

As Antonia Pont writes in her interesting online project, (“Moving Listening: A PoeticCycle” Refractory (online),<http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/stateofplay/articles/APont.html>, February, 2005,accessed: 27th October, 2005), “Listening = Hearing + Intention.”

B. Truax (Acoustic Communication, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984) firstprovided this simple definition.

R. Bandt, “Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, An Audible Polyphony,”Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/NationPaper.html>, June, 2001a,accessed: 5th November, 2005.

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“Music is always in the making, groping its way through some frail and mysterious passage -and a very strange one it is - between nature and culture.”—Pierre Schaeffer

sounds:pierre schaeffer | etude aux chemins de fer (2:52, ohm, 2000 [1948]) | playluc ferarri | presque rien no. 1 c (4:42, presque rien , 1998 [1970]) | play

Pierre Schaeffer and R. Murrary Schafer—two men with similar namesare the father figures of sound art. Of course, to say this is to provide ahistory all too neat, to provide a history that pushes to the boundariesthe flirtations and frolickings in this field by earlier practitioners—and toentirely eclipse the technicians who invented the recording techniques soindispensable to the practice. What does it mean, then, to reduce acomplex history to these two figures; to sideline John Cage and LucFerarri, Luigi Russolo and Pierre Henry? Schaeffer and Schafer wereperhaps the first two practitioners and writers to articulate somethinglike a program and motivation for an aesthetic and ethical investigationof the world as sound, and to harness new recording technology as a toolin their respective projects. This pair did not work together andsuggested quite different engagements with the world, but both imaginedthe world as a glory box of sounds.

Schafer is the progenitor of the ecological, nominally ‘scientific’ side ofsoundscape art. His 1977 book, The Tuning of the World, is stillreferenced regularly today. In it, Schafer argues that, mostfundamentally: “acoustic ecology is… the study of sounds in relationshipto life and society. This cannot be accomplished by remaining in thelaboratory. It can only be accomplished by considering on location theeffects of the acoustic environment on the creatures living in it.” AsWrightson notes, Schafer was pragmatic in his approach to awakening akind of ‘aural awareness’ in the general public: “Schafer’s response to theproblem [of noise pollution] was to develop a range of ‘ear cleaning’exercises including ‘soundwalks,’ a walking meditation where the objectis to maintain a high level of sonic awareness.” Schafer wrote that theacoustic explorer “must thoroughly understand the environment [s]he istackling; [s]he must have training in acoustics, psychology, sociology,music, and a great deal more besides, as the occasion demands.”Schafer gave force to this holistic, ecological approach by deploying theterm “soundscape” in quite a specific way—the soundscape imagines theentirety of sound in a place as a scene to be investigated down to itsminute detail, and for analysis to be done always with a particular stresson sound's impact for human subjects. Schafer was motivated by whathe perceived to be the rapid shift from landscapes with ‘natural’ or “hi-fi”soundscapes (“in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because ofthe low ambient noise level”) to those of ‘industrial’ or “lo-fi” sounds (inwhich “individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdensepopulation of sounds”). Put crudely, this is a refiguring of theurban/rural dichotomy—familiar since at least the time of Virgil’spastoral poetry—with a valorisation of the rural. (See Italian futuristLuigi Russolo’s “Art of Noises” essay for the reverse of this valorisation.)But it, nevertheless, emerges from a legitimate concern about urbannoise pollution. Schafer was instrumental in establishing the WorldSoundscape Project (WSP) and in drawing together interested academicsand practitioners at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada. Thesetwo groups—virtually interchangeable—lent strength to a burgeoningacoustic ecology movement.

Pierre Schaeffer’s project was perhaps more musically formalist, yetequally revolutionary in its break from classical instrumentation.Schaeffer is widely known as the figurehead of the ‘musique concrete’style of musical composition. This is a style that understood audio tapeas a kind of instrument to be stretched, cut and spliced. Theseexperiments utilised recordings of non-musical, ‘concrete’ objects. JoseIges provides a neat summary Schaeffer’s genesis:

Pierre SchaefferSource: "Archives GRM; INA 30 Years"

R. Murrary SchaferSource: "A True Renaissance Man"

Luc FerrariSource: "Archives GRM; INA 30 Years"

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Starting in 1948, in the studios of ORTF, now RadioFrance, this musician and researcher set out tosystematise, for compositional purposes, concrete sounds,which to some extent amount to the sounds on whichsoundscape authors have drawn. However, one ofSchaeffer's particular obsessions was to create a "solfa ofsound objects" in his Traité des objets musicaux, torecognise these objects as realities which could beabstracted beyond the "sound-producing body" whichgenerated them.

As this suggests, the ‘sound’ is both a currency of musical and concretevalue for Schaeffer. He wrote that,

Any sound phenomenon can be taken[,] like the words of alanguage[,] for its relative meaning or its actual substance.In that its meaning predominates, and this is what we playwith, it is literature and not music. But how can we forgetits meaning, isolate it from the sound phenomenon? Thisrequires two prior operations: Distinguishing an element(listening to it in itself, for its texture, its material, itscolour). Repeating it. Repeat the same sound fragmenttwice: the event is replaced by music.

He gives the example of a train—the recorded sound of its travellingalong tracks may be repeated for some time without any change in itspattern, and such an experience, he suggests, “makes us forget that weare dealing with a train.”

The fundamental distinction between these men’s perceptions of soundis one of context. For Pierre Schaeffer, l’objet sonore (‘the sonorousobject’) is the most interesting sound; that is, the sound shorn of context—a single sound, alone and autonomous. As Brian Kane notes,Schaeffer’s observations emerge from a tradition aligned with thephenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for it reduces sound tothe experience of hearing: “The sonorous object is only attained whensound no longer functions as a medium for signification.” But forSchafer this is conceptually unappealing and theoretically impossible. AsProy summarises the Schafer view, “[Schaferian] soundscapes ought notto be reduced to merely quantitative acoustic valuation. Soundscaperesearch analyses the interaction of sounds in their contexts.” YetSchafer also holds in mind the notion that

most sounds of the environment are produced by knownobjects and one of the most useful ways of cataloguingthem is according to their referential aspects. But thesystem used to organise such a vast number ofdesignations will be arbitrary, for no sound has anobjective meaning, and the observer will have specificcultural attitudes towards the subject.

This, as Proy points out, is similar to the internally-referential semioticsand linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.

I engage with the practical meaning of these debates for listeners morein other sections of the site; it is perhaps enough to note here the split inviews and their initial effect of producing two different understandings ofsound art: one in which context yields meaning, the other in whichautonomous sounds were to be uncoupled from their concrete object oforigin.

The rigid distinctions of these two ‘families’ perhaps remain less visibletoday. Nevertheless, it seems Schaeffer’s abstraction has been absorbedby the Schaferians, but less flow has occurred in the other direction. AsBarry Truax, a Schafer colleague and member of SFU and WSP, writes

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the soundscape composition, as pioneered at Simon FraserUniversity since the early 1970s, has evolved rapidly toexplore a full range of approaches from the ‘found sound’representation of acoustic environments through to theincorporation of highly abstracted sonic transformations.The structural approaches similarly range from beinganalogues of real-world experience, such as listening froma fixed spatial perspective or moving through a connectedseries of acoustic spaces, to those that mirror bothnonlinear mental experiences of memory recall, dreams,and free association, as well as artificial sonic constructsmade familiar and possible by modern ‘schizophonic’audio techniques of sonic layering and embedding.

It is an indicator of the break down in boundaries that Truax notes thepresence of ‘schizophonic’ compositions in the SFU-Schaferian field, for‘schizophonic’ techniques are aligned with the decontextualised concreteof Schaeffer. Yet one sees some resistance to this inclusion with Traux’sdesignation of this technique as “artificial”—a slightly negative label healso applies to “montage” works elsewhere in the essay. As such remarksmake us aware, the vector of the Schaferian sound artists remainsdirected towards the original goal of ecology; of aural awareness and aconcomitant concern with noise pollution: it aspires to convey a kind oflocatable, real—not ‘artificial’—soundscape with political and socialimplications.

[1] Quoted in J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4,CEC: Canada, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000,date accessed: 3rd October, 2005.

[2] As H. Westerkamp has written, “to date, there have been few attempts to definesoundscape composition as a genre; … to highlight its potential in enhancing listeningawareness” (“Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,” Soundscapes.nl(online), <http://www.omroep.nl/nps/radio/supplement/99/soundscapes/westerkamp.html>,1999, accessed: 5th November, 2005). While Westerkamp was writing some years ago—andthe range of writing seems to have expanded since that time—what writing there has been, itseems, has tended towards an early orthodoxy. If I propagate that orthodoxy here, I do somerely because I lack the resources and space to truly challenge this. Nevertheless, it seemsthat Francisco Lopez’s articles, referenced throughout this site, do offer something like anarticulate and impassioned dissenting voice in this field.

[3] R. M. Schafer, The Tuning of the World , New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, p205.

[4] K. Wrightson, “An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology,” eContact! (online), 5.3, CEC:Canada, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/NAISA/introduction.html>, 2002, date accessed:3rd October, 2005.

[5] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p206.

[6] See, for instance, R. M. Schafer’s earlier book The New Soundscape, Toronto: BerandolMusic, 1969. But also R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977.

[7] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p43.

[8] See H. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape and Acoustic Ecology,” Organised Sound, 7.1,2002, pp51-56, for a memoir of one of the central figures in this group. For a more objectiveaccount, see J. Iges, op. cit.

[9] J. Iges, op. cit.

[10] Schaeffer quoted in J. Iges, op. cit.

[11] Schaeffer quoted in J. Iges, op. cit.

[12] B. Kane, “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Reflections on the Philosophical Origins ofMusique Concrète,” conference paper, Spark 2005: Festival of Electronic Music and Art,University of Minnesota, available online:<http://spark.cla.umn.edu/archive2005/SPro_sec3.pdf>, 2005, p58.

[13] G. Proy, “Sound and Sign,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p17.

[14] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p137.

[15] G. Proy, op. cit., p18.

[16] While it is rhetorically appealing to suggest a radical split in these views—and perhapssome kind of narrativised transatlantic battle—most accounts suggest that the distinction wasone of methodology and one maintained through fairly amiable relations. It is perhapsenough to note here that Schaeffer is mentioned several times in Schafer’s book, and alwayswith some reverence. See, for instance, R. M. Schafer, (op. cit., 1977), p111, p129 & p134.

[17] R.M. Schafer (op. cit., 1977, pp90-91) defines ‘schizophonia’ as “the split between an

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original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction. It is another twentieth-century development.” This is Benjaminian argument about the status of the ‘original sound’and the mechanical/technological reproduction of it on disc, tape or computer. But forSchafer, this shift was undoubtedly a negative one: “it creates a synthetic soundscape inwhich natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutesare providing the operative signals directing modern life.” (ibid)

[18] B. Traux, “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at SimonFraser University,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p12

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“By the typical bushman [I mean] the Bush-grown, Bush-rooted product, the nomad tetheredin the limits of the cattle-track, the shepherd stagnant among out-station sheep, or the manhidden all his days among the gullies and the ranges, in a world bounded on the one side bythe remote township, and on the other by the great Australian silence.”—A. G. Stephens

sounds:lawrence english | ghost towns (18:18, ghost towns, 2004) | play

If Stephens provides one account of the Australian landscape and itsinhabitants, artist David Keenan provides another in which Stephens’version is overwritten; the pioneer-martyr is replaced by humansmallness and folly.

David Keenan, West, oil on linen, 82 x 122cm, 1992.Source: "Savill Galleries - Landscapes," no date.

In Keenan’s West, a tiny community sits on the crest of a hill. Filling therest of the canvas are a tapestry of rusted hills, inky valleys and risingmountains. Roads snake through this landscape, following no discerniblelogic other than the need to mark out, like wild animals, a set of co-ordinates for human space. Another settlement is perched further backand barely visible. It’s sited on the border zone of the setting’svertiginous mountain backdrop. The landscape is massive, uneven,unsettled—almost monumental. The human efforts are mocked throughscale—they are at once pitiful (roads like the aimless desk etchings ofbored schoolkids) and melancholic (so much isolation): “White Man inAustralia was truly alone. Having silenced nature in his old history, andslaughtered the natives in his new history, the cultural subjectivity of theWhite Man was situated in a place he did not know, with no-one to talkto but himself.”

Nevertheless, the logic of settlement, for all its seemingly illogicalperversity in West, is one figured around resources. Whether wealth-bringing (seen in mining and other attempts to harness naturalresources) or life-giving (water and food, most fundamentally), the logicsof settlement are brittle in the face of wider contingencies. The arrival ofdrought, the competition of other nearby towns, the depletion of naturalresources and the buffeting winds of global capital—as given to carryingone along on the winds of success as blowing one backwards—are but afew of the forces in operation for the town and city embedded in natural,state and international flows. With their oxidised lace-iron balconies andcorrugated-iron sheds, the ghost towns which dot the Australianlandscape are an index of this boom and bust. Their empty and desolatestreetscapes represent, in the terms of Stephens, the encroaching of thesilence into the township.

But these ghost towns figure also in a broader context. They figure, forinstance, as an example of the “destructiveness” Paul Carter sees in the

Ghost Towns installation image Source: Lawrence English

Kidston, Ravenswood, Queensland Source: B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, p65.

Lawrence EnglishSource: Liquid Architecture

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planet’s diminishing bio and cultural diversity. The awareness of thisdestruction, for Carter, removes the possibility of an autonomoussoundscape art:

[T]he global character of this destructiveness, and the latecapitalistic systems of human and environmentalexploitation that drive it, prevents us from consideringacoustic ecology apart from the larger multi-sensory andpolyvalent life-world within which vocalisation, music-making, hearing and listening occur. A definition ofauditory knowledge that insulates it from the occasions ofsound making and marking reproduces the shortcomingsof the 'visualist' fallacy.

In line with this, sound artist Lawrence English has noted in an interviewthat before embarking on his Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) project, heresearched the phenomenon through the writings of Barry McGowanand Colin Hooper. English’s CD release and the gallery installation—which adds photography to the soundscape—both come with minimalrecognition of this admirable effort to situate the towns of his recordingsin a context at once global and local. Despite remaining a trace elementrather than an overt statement, the project is imbued with a sense ofthoughtfulness that functions without deadening any immediate affectiveresponse.

The piece starts out quietly and follows a narrative of exploration: thereare birds, the sounds of walking, what sounds like a rattlesnake, the low,eerie rumble of wind, insects, flies. Later, English starts thumping whatsounds like a disused oil drum before the familiar, deafening shriek ofcicadas overwhelms all else in the recording. The piece is narrativised—in the sense that it follows a logic of peripatetic exploration—but isopen in its form; selective and astute but without dictation. FollowingCarter, we can see that the “sound knowledge” in English’s work “is anti-perspectival, immersive, symbolic but non-imaginal, looped (in thefeedback between listening and speaking) and eventful. These qualitiesare performative. They represent time and space as the doubled historyand geography of encounters.” This is particularly fitting for ghosttowns, for they are melancholy spaces, locatable in a multiplicity ofnarratives (Indigenous, prospecting, settler, post-industrial, nostalgic).As McCartney writes, “soundscape composers can act as interpreters ofthe various languages of places” —for English, this process began withresearch, but this skeleton gained flesh as he encountered the space.

Indeed, English’s Ghost Towns reactivates these ruined towns in timeand space. He engages a kind of nostalgia and reverie, but alwayssituates this in dialogue with other histories which circulate outside ofsuch a frame: “The essence of soundscape composition is the artistic,sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment andlistening perception.” As such, Ghost Towns is not the site of anossifying nostalgia (identified by Massey as the ruse of backwardnationalism ); it is a work aware of the various groups and momentsthat have inhabited the spaces it wanders through. English’s piece evokes

Graveyard, Mount Milligan, North Queensland.Source: B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, p81.

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a specific scene that, paradoxically, remains generalisable across theAustralian landscape. As Blainey writes, “in every region [of Australia]travellers using even the main roads come across the remains of thesedead or fast-asleep towns.”

English says he “was deeply aware of the social histories that surroundthe towns themselves.” As a result of this, he went to areas aroundQueensland and made field recordings in places where he “becamefascinated with this idea of natural reclamation of land once inhabited bysettlers.” In this interest, English mirrors Tony Birch’s concern in hisrecent essay, “‘Death is Forgotten in Victory’: Colonial Landscapes andNarratives of Emptiness.” In this essay, Birch visits Steiglitz, aVictorian ghost town. Any surface similarity between the works isdeepened by a similar use of the cemetery as the locus of rumination.English remarks that “in some of the graveyards for instance we wereable to find the resting places of a few of the original settlers.” InBirch’s essay, the Steiglitz graveyard is a site for profound meditation onthe meaning of these spaces: “For me, the visit to the cemeteries atSteiglitz transferred the life and death of an otherwise ‘pioneer object’ ofthe past into both a real and metaphysical present.”

This transfer of life and death, past and present is the aim of thesoundscape art that English practices in his Ghost Towns work. In themost rudimentary way, an encounter with this work is an encounter withthe past ‘present’ of its recording (the ‘schizophonia’ of Schafer discussedelsewhere). But in a deeper way, English’s walk around the spaces ofghost towns is also a kind of conversation between historical past andpresent, between artist and inhabitant, between wind and iron, betweencicada and microphone. In English’s editing of the piece, theseconversations are amorphous and shapeshifting—one is prioritised thenanother. The work is a whole to be experienced as such; time andduration—that is to say, memory—is fundamental to its function as anexploration of space. Any soundscape is always an unfolding experience,evocative in the way it stretches over time; as a kind of virtual,phenomenological experience it takes artists time to ‘image’ a sense ofspace.

There are several models used to understand the way listeners conjurean image of the soundscape space. One of these is acousmatics, a theoryput forward by Pierre Schaeffer and elucidated further by fellow Frenchwriter François Bayle. Acousmatics describes the process of listeningto a sound without seeing its source (following the ‘akousmatikoi’ modelof Pythagoras’ students—who watched their lecturer orate from behind ascreen ):

One who has not experienced in the dark the sensation ofhearing points of infinite distance, trajectories and waves,sudden whispers, so near, moving sound matter, in reliefand in colour, cannot imagine the invisible spectacle forthe ears. Imagination gives wings to intangible sound.Acousmatic art is the art of mental representationstriggered by sound.

Bayle added nuance to this model by positing two different types oflistening: ‘perception allocentrique’ and the ‘perception egocentrique’.In the ‘allocentrique’ mode, there is a radical understanding of everysound as important, there is no centre; in the ‘egocentrique’ mode, ourlistening determines the focus—“we decide, we focus, we put togethereverything that happens in the room.” Another model Schaefferproposed was that of the “acoustic screen” (e’cran sonore): “Whilelistening to sound projection, for instance to radio, the listenerhim/herself is the acoustic screen on which sound images are beingprojected. We listen to sound images created by a composer or a radioproducer and form our own personal sound images.”

Perhaps the neatest summary of the commonality in these two models is

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to suggest that the listener creates his or her own virtual space throughimagination, at once drawing on life-experience through memory andthe sonic materials provided by the artist. This gives the works asense of narrative and transience that would superficially seem difficultto achieve without some kind of voice-over or clearly signpostednarration. Often, this narrative is predicated on the notion that we’re atrest while the world moves around us. That is, as static listeners, wesubmit to the map of a journey inked by the soundscape artist but thenourselves provide the colour for their outlines: “listening tosoundscapes…touches our personal repertoire of listening. Messages aredecoded in relation to our own sound experiences. Because sounds arelinked to memorised experiences, internal images arise.”

Radiating out from the ghost towns of Brisbane, then, are a range ofexperiences which listeners to Lawrence English’s piece may be drawingon: the towns themselves, other rural towns, outback experiences,summer days in a creaking back shed, a barbeque in a park, an Americanghost town. The options are potentially infinite, but this is not to reducethe soundscape of Ghost Towns to mere cipher. Ghost Towns engageswith a specific Australian space at a time, as recognised by Blainey andMcGowan, when once prosperous towns are withering. But this is onlyone narrative to be picked from the tapestry English provides; GhostTowns speaks with different voices and is heard in manifold ways.

A.G. Stephens quoted in J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside AcousticSpace,” Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May, 1994, accessed:5th November, 2005.

J. Belfrage, op. cit.

P. Carter, “Ambiguous Traces,” Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>, June, 2001,accessed: 5th November, 2005.

B. B. Fish, “Field of Dreams,” Cyclic Defrost, 10, January 2005, magazine interview withLawrence English, p16 (also available online: http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?article=762). See, particularly, B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, South Melbourne:Thomas C. Lothian, 2002.

See A. McCartney, (“Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in HildegardWesterkamp’s Cricket Voice (or ‘I Don’t Like the Country, the Crickets Make Me Nervous’),”Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002a, pp45-49) for an intriguing comparative account of thecricket’s/cicada’s function in different areas of sound design. F. Lopez (“Environmental SoundMatter,” <http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html>, April, 1998, accessed: 4th November,2005) also notes that cricket/cicada is the ultimate acousmatic species—it is always heard,but rarely seen.

P. Carter, op. cit.

A. McCartney, “Circumscribed Journeys Through Soundscape Composition,” OrganisedSound, 7.1, 2002b, p1.

H. Westerkamp, “Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,”Soundscapes.nl (online),<http://www.omroep.nl/nps/radio/supplement/99/soundscapes/westerkamp.html>, 1999,accessed: 5th November, 2005.

D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, pp4-5.

G. Blainey, “Foreword,” in B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, South Melbourne:Thomas C. Lothian, 2002, p.vi.

B. B. Fish, op. cit., p16.

Ibid.

T. Birch, “‘Death is Forgotten in Victory’: Colonial Landscapes and Narratives ofEmptiness,” in Jane Lydon (ed.), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia,Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005, forthcoming.

B. B. Fish, op. cit., p16.

T. Birch, op. cit., 2005, np.

F. Bayle, Musique acousmatique – propositions . . . positions, Bibliotheque de recherchemusicale INA-GRM, Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1993. Cited in both G. Proy, “Sound andSign,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p17 & F. Dhomont, “Acousmatic Update,” Sonic ArtsNetwork (online),<http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/ARTICLES/ARTICLE1996DHOMONT.html>, date accessed:6th November, 2005. Article originally published in SAN Journal of Electroacoustic Music , 9,1996.

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C. Cox, “Abstract Concrete: Francisco Lopez and the Ontology of Sound,” Cabinet(online), 2, Spring 2001, <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/abstractconcrete.php>,accessed: 5th November, 2005. As part of his project, Francisco Lopez requests that hisaudience wear blindfolds when attending his performances.

F. Dhomont, op. cit.

G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

See T. Wishart, “Sound Symbols and Landscapes,” The Language of ElectroacousticMusic, edited by Simon Emmerson, London: Macmillan, 1986, pp41-60 for an accountsimilar to this ‘combination’ model.

A stunning example of this kind of field recording is American artist Keith FullertonWhitman’s Dartmouth Street Underpass (Locust Music, 2003). This is largely what its titlesays—a recording of a train underpass. A microphone was set-up and the space wasrecorded to be morphed into a twenty minute piece that is both universal and specific.Whitman’s piece is at once about a particular time and place (in Boston), but could also bealmost any city around the Western world.

G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

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sounds:alan lamb | night passage (24:51, night passage , 1998) | playalan lamb | last anzac (12:55, night passage , 1998) | playalan lamb | fragment of the outback (10:36, motion: movement in australian sound, 2003) | playfrancisco lopez | addy en el país de las frutas (excerpt, 3:08, addy en el país de las frutas, 2003) |play

In the same way visual representations (photography, etchings, a canvas,cinematography) can never ‘contain’ the entirety of a space, an audiorepresentation is always limited in its ability to depict a particularlandscape—something always spills over the borders. Both visual andaudio art are, then, always a kind of interpretive framing of a givengeographic area; they always work to emphasise and de-emphasiseparticular elements of place. John Berger points this out in his seminal1972 book, Ways of Seeing: “Every image embodies a way of seeing…Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, ofthe photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possiblesights.” Many soundscape artists seem aware of this as both ananalogous and specific problem within their field. How these artistsproceed to acknowledge or disavow the boundaries of their work is afascinating element of in their creations—and one which has noticeableeffects on the works produced.

Different artistic methods and different approaches to ‘imaging’ spaceare implicit commentaries on what an artist values and what theydevalue. Iges calls this a “compositional attitude” and it mediates thespace between the reality of a landscape and its representation.Francisco Lopez, a Spanish sound artist and salient writer on debateswithin sound art, writes of his utter dissatisfaction with the Schaferianparadigm—and of his utter love for the Schaefferian objet sonore, as wellhis conception of ‘absolute music’ and a striving for the ineffable. Thisis one instance of an artistic preference—in this case a heavily modernistone—which reveals a series of interests and assumptions borne out inLopez’s dense and often heavily abstracted work.

The Western Australian sound artist Alan Lamb also provides aninteresting example of an obtuse soundscape art that rejects any obvioussense of ‘realism’. Working with the sounds produced at the interface ofculture and nature, Lamb presents an intriguing interpretation of spaceand the process of field recording. His interest is in capturing the soundof wires, a project he began with the “Faraway Wind Organ” in 1976 (butwhich he retraces to the acts of his Aunt, who, when looking after Alan asa boy, would put her ear to telephone poles to "hear the sound the worldmade" ). Along a half-mile tract of land in Western Australia, therewere a series of disused power and telephone lines. Lamb conceived ofthe wires on this property as one massive instrument—the “FarawayWind Organ.” As Bandt writes, such wires “are sound sculptures in theirown right, giant wind harps sounding according to their environmentalconditions,” and represent a form of sound art with a “huge history”locally. The sounds captured by Lamb recall a droning guitar, anexperimental string quartet or choir rather than a length of telegraphwire; there’s an impressionistic barrenness to the sound which recallsthe type of wide-open area that Lamb uses to record these pieces. In thissense Lambs work is a kind of aural poeticism in contrast to the ‘realist’approach of the Schaferian acoustic ecologists.

Lamb’s wire pieces restage outside language the encounter betweenAustralian land and pioneer culture (as figured in the telegraph). This‘silencing’ of language has the effect of democratising the exchange,removing symbolic violence and power relations embedded in theoriginal exchanges or encounters between European settlers, Indigenouspeople and the land: “Beloved and known by the indigenous peoples forso long, the land's identity and subjectivity was critically altered [byEuropean settlement]. It was occupied by invading forces who could not

Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999)Source: Australian Sound Design Project

Francisco LopezSource: Alien8 Recordings

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understand it. Their knowledge practices manifested a highly selectiveepistemic deafness”. Carter notes that this European ‘deafness’ wasnot so much wilful ignorance as an indicator of Europe’s infatuation withthe rationalism of the industrial revolution—this historical moment had“destroyed the old European knowledge-practices” that understood“nature as a living, speaking, listening subject.” If Lamb’s workattempts to reconnect with this ‘old’ set of knowledge-practices, it doesnot overwrite Indigenous history in Australia. While Lamb does notmake any overt display within the works of an engagement withIndigenous history, he declares that

I place great importance on researching [A]boriginalsignificance of the site. In one case (Wogarno Station,mid[-]west outback, W[estern] A[ustralia]), I believe thesite used to have sacred importance to the [A]boriginesbefore the clearances of the mid 20th century. Now‘abandoned’ I nevertheless used the site with the greatestpossible sensitivity so that the installation could sound yetbe almost invisible and interfere minimally with the land….In all sites the installation has to be sympatheticaesthetically and spiritually.

Like the historical research of Lawrence English, an awareness of thelandscape as a kind of palimpsest informs Lamb’s wire works; it is aconsciousness awake to a “view of the spatial…as an ever-shifting socialgeometry of power and signification.” By moving toward a sound artwhich ‘records’ the land through the rumbles, scrapes and hums of itswire appendages, Lamb seems at times to offer an aural narrative ofviolence and desolation. Perhaps we can hear in Lamb, then, a land andcountry in a constant state of Becoming—the violence of regeneration.“Lamb embraces vast and isolated spaces in his work,” Bandt notes, “asystem he relates to coherent biological patterns such as those involvedin the development of the embryo and in the function of the humanbrain.”

In such thickly symbolic but also deeply beautiful music, Lamb avoidsthe “illusion of place” Lopez notes as pervading literal “naturemusic.” There is an unmistakeable negative charge to Lopez’sdiscussion of ‘acoustic ecology’ recording practices, but this is notwithout basis. Acoustic ecology or ‘bioacoustician’ practices seem toefface the technology intrinsic to their acts of representation, offering upa purported realism that ‘images’ spaces unproblematically. One needonly return to Berger’s earlier point about visual art to see the generalfallacy of this—and Lopez does not stop short on pointing out theparticular fallacy of the ‘bioacousticians’:

Now that we have digital recording technology (with all itsconcomitant sound quality improvements) we can realizemore straightforwardly that the microphones are—theyalways have been—our basic interfaces in our attempt atapprehending the sonic world around us, and also thatthey are non-neutral interfaces. Different microphones‘hear’ so differently that they can be considered as a firsttransformational step with more dramatic consequencesthan, for example, a further re-equalization of therecordings in the studio. Even [though] we don't subtractor add anything[,] we cannot avoid having a version ofwhat we consider as reality.

Indeed, if microphones are revealed as biased forms of technology (inboth a technical and rhetorical sense), the purported veil of ‘realism’ islifted. Of course, one may protest that ‘realism’ is never so absolutist inits conception as to purportedly bring ‘reality’ to the listener through arecording, but it is the pretence of natural, untempered ‘reportage’ whichLopez is complicating. As he points out, perhaps a more apt label for

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such ‘realistic’ works would be “hyper-realism”—for it is a reality free ofblemishes and unachievable within the spaces they allege torepresent. A related concern of many ‘realist’ works is the appearanceof an unedited—again, untempered—recording of nature-as-it-is. Yet, asLopez asks rhetorically: “If we are pursuing naturalness in our soundwork, what kind of editing is more ‘real'?” To posit an unedited whole—which seems practically unattainable (when do you stop the recording?)—is to be deaf to the creativity afforded by cutting, juxtaposition andsplicing; in short, by the techniques so frequently exploited in filmediting.

All of this does not severe a connection between space and soundscaperecording. But it expresses scepticism about some of the claims for‘realism’ inherent in both the statements of artists and theoreticians;claims which attempt to elide the artist-as-mediator. Indeed, works suchLamb’s wire music pieces—and Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) ofEnglish—are an artistic interpretation and intervention into theAustralian landscape/soundscape and obtain value because of that. Theirframing and artistic choices are not the unimportant borders of thework, but form part of the central meanings which they convey to thelistener.

J. Berger, Ways of Seeing , Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p10.

J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4, CEC: Canada,<http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000, date accessed: 3rd

October, 2005.

F. Lopez, “Schizophonia vs. L’Objet Sonore: Soundscapes and Artistic Freedom,”eContact!, 1.4, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Ecology/Lopez.html>, Canada: CEC, 1998,accessed: 4th November, 2005. See also C. Cox, “Abstract Concrete: Francisco Lopez andthe Ontology of Sound,” Cabinet (online), 2, Spring 2001,<http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/abstractconcrete.php>, accessed: 5th November,2005. This understanding of music as ‘ineffable’ recalls the 1961 work of VladimirJankélévitch, only recently translated into English—Music and the Ineffable, Carolyn Abbate(trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.

J. Jenkins, “Alan Lamb,” 22 Contemporary Australian Composers , 1988, reprinted online:<http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/lamb.html>, accessed: 6th November, 2005.

R. Bandt, Sound Sculpture: Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, Sydney:Craftsman House, 2001b, p32. A. McLennan ("Hollow Mansions of the Upper Air,"<http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s873159.htm>, ABC Online, 2003, accessed: 6th

November, 2005) quotes Australian composer Percy Grainer from 1952: "What I meant by'telegraph wire instrument' is an instrument that could imitate the gradually rising tones onehears approaching a telegraph wire, the gradually sinking tones one hears going away froma telegraph wire - in other words, gliding tones."

Alan Lamb describes the “choir-like quality of wire music in which the sound is made upof numerous voices, each competing for harmonic dominance.” (Quoted in R. Bandt, op. cit.,2001b, p32.)

J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian SoundDesign Project , <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,1994, accessed: 5th November, 2005.

P. Carter, “Ambiguous Traces,” Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>, June, 2001,accessed: 5th November, 2005.

A. Lamb, “Biographical Information—Artist, Composer, Sound Scupltor and SystemsDeveloper,” Australian Sound Design Project ,<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000277b.htm>, 2 July, 2002, accessed:5th November, 2005. Note the bracketed items here are grammatical corrections—Lamb’sinterview is somewhat ‘loose’ in its adherence to grammar.

D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p3.

R. Bandt, op. cit., 2001b, p32.

F. Lopez, “Environmental Sound Matter,” <http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html>, April,1998, accessed: 4th November, 2005.

F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

J. Iges, op. cit.

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Throughout these pages, I present a version of the argument Wishartpursued nineteen years ago when he wrote that

if the term [landscape] is to have any significance in[sound art,] we must define it as the source from which weimagine the sounds to come. The loudspeakerhas...allowed us to set up a virtual acoustic space intowhich we may project an image of any real existingacoustic space, and the existence of this virtual acousticspace presents us with new creative possibilities.

Creativity and imagination are the key words here. If Schafer’s ‘acousticecology’ attempted a blank reportage of the world’s soundscape, itinitially refused to acknowledge the creative possibilities—outside ofrealism—that could come from other techniques. It also denied thefalsehood of an equivalence between the real sounds of the environmentand the representation of them in the realm of technology (microphones,amplification, speakers). Iges puts it nicely when notes that in soundart, “memory appeals to forgetfulness to endow the work itself withaesthetic meaning”—we must forget the original moment of recording inorder to properly appreciate the present replay.

The soundscape gains some of its aesthetic force from this tensionbetween true and false. In Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) Englishedited down hours of material to 18 minutes that do not make thiscompression apparent. Likewise, Alan Lamb’s Wind Organ is at once atruth and a falsity. It is an ‘instrument’ he found in the West Australianoutback, but it is also an instrument he plays and compiles the bestmoments of for release on CD. It is an element within that landscape,but it is, again, manipulated to respond in particular ways. Falsity carriesno negative vector here—it is instead a byword for creativity, in the sameway it can be for writers of fiction and poetry.

Indeed, creativity/falsity is also another way to suggest that space isalways contested; ‘contested’ not always in a violent way, but in a waythat proceeds through varying and diffused engagements. The frame,then, is always contingent, is always prone to slipping and re-setting byanother.

Such a way of conceptualising the spatial, moreover,inherently implies the existence in the lived world of asimultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting,intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing inrelations of paradox or antagonism. Most evidently this isso because the social relations of space are experienceddifferently, and variously interpreted, by those holdingdifferent positions as part of it. But it may also be seen tobe so by…analogy with modern physics. For there too theobserver is inevitably within the world (the space) beingobserved. And this in turn means that it partly constitutesthe observer and the observer it, and the fact of theobserver’s constitution of it means that there is necessarilya multiplicity of different spaces, or takes on space.

The artist is a presence in the world. Their recording is evidence of this—they were there (in whatever sense one imagines this) and somehowchanged the space. Like a thumb covering the lens of a camera, the artistalerts us to their own presence in the act of creation. Sound art, however,instates the listener too as an agent of spatial and temporal memory. Thelistener brings yet another set of understandings to the space imaginedby the work: Lamb’s wires hum in the wind and then it is our song tosing.

Alan LambSource: Australian Sound Design Project

Lawrence EnglishSource: Cyclic Defrost

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T. Wishart, “Sound Symbols and Landscapes,” The Language of Electroacoustic Music,edited by Simon Emmerson, London: Macmillan, 1986, p43.

J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4, CEC: Canada,<http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000, date accessed: 3rd

October, 2005.

J. Iges, op. cit.

J. Iges, op. cit.

D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p3.

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Berger, John, Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p10.

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Kane, Brian, “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Reflections on the Philosophical Origins ofMusique Concrète,” conference paper, Spark 2005: Festival of Electronic Music andArt, University of Minnesota, available online:<http://spark.cla.umn.edu/archive2005/SPro_sec3.pdf>, 2005, pp58-61.

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Discography

English, Lawrence, Ghost Towns, Room 40, 2004.

Ferarri, Luc, Presque Rien, INA GRM, 1998 (1970).

Fullerton Whitman, Keith, Dartmouth Street Underpass, Locust Music, 2003.

Lamb, Alan, Primal Image, Dorobo, 1995.

-------------, Night Passage, Dorobo, 1998.

-------------, Wogarno Wire Installation (sound clips),<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000278b.htm>, 1999.

Lopez, Francisco, Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches, Alien8, 2003.

Motion: Movement in Australian Sound, Preservation, 2003.

Schaeffer, Pierre, OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, Ellipsis Arts, 2000

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(1948).

Images

Image behind site logo taken from the website of Botany Department, University ofMelbourne. All other images as cited.