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Field recordings

Headscapes – compositions for headphones

This is a broadcast of a CD publication for the exhibition "Headscapes - Kompositionen für Kopfhörer", taking place in the gallery "Besenkammer - etwas Raum für Kunst" in Saarbrücken, Germany, May 27 through June 23, 2010. The exhibition is the final presentation of a project at the Hochschule der Bildenden Kunste Saar, Germany, within the department Audiovisual Arts led by Christina Kubisch. Curated by Marc Behrens and Stefan Zintel, organized by Peter Strickmann.For more information, please visit www.besenkammer.org.

Subjective inner sound spaces, spatialization experiments for what is heard in the inside, technical approaches to the infinity of  the space inside the head. Listening pieces for the space inside the head require an engagement for the unknown and unconscious, for introspection and alienation from the exterior space. They can only be experienced via headphones or special mechanic constructions. Novel spaces can be generated virtually and challenge the listener's standpoint, proprioception of head and body: the average seventeen centimeters between the ears. The listener is not situated inside the sound space, rather allows it to occur within him, he ultimately absorbs the universe.

 

1 Alexandra von Bassen: Marseille, ma ville 5:26 ["Marseille, my city"]

Margaux Littra, who is living in Germany for one year, recounts of her city in the south of France. Her voice, as well as audio recordings from Marseille and the surrounding area, made in December 2009, are the components of this sound story for headphones.

 

2 Daniel Henrich: hear drum, eardrum 6:25

All of us hear with a drum, our eardrum. Sound hits the eardrum, but the actual hearing takes place in the organ behind the membrane. I have set up various durms with microphones inside them. When a sound hits the drumhead, the otherwise familiar sound is changed by the membrane and the space behind it. The sounds we hear with our eardrum, and the sounds we hear in the drum are transformed into new sounds. So we have to rethink: Do the sounds we hear sound the way we believe they do? Do we all hear the same? Different drums sound differently. By composing a piece for headphones I intend to isolate the viewer from the room he is in, and place him inside a new space, the space behind the membrane. We are so used to the way we hear, that the different sounds created by another membrane sound somehow different, but also awkwardly familiar.

 

3 Deng Runxia: Nachher 1:15 ["Afterwards"]

 I make a composition for headphones. I use the decay curve of the sounds of different everyday objects like glasses, bowls, as well as the reverberation of selected spaces and of spatially interesting situation in the outside.

 

4 Stefan Zintel: Inner / Outer Circle 4:57

Humans can assign direction to sound events they perceive. The spatial perception and localization depends substantially on the moment of sound impact. In my work, the "in-head localization" for sounds in different frequency ranges is the main point.

 

5 Hye-Kyoung Kwon: WG 2:08 ["Shared apartment"]

I live in a shared apartment. I am from South Korea, and my flat mates are from Italy (Milan) and Germany (Cologne). All of us speak differently. On headphones I bring all these languages together into one space, into one person. Language barriers melt. A single language is created with the possibilities of composition.

 

6 Peter Strickmann: Vom Sickern und Süppeln 6:44 ["Of seeping and oozing"]

Composition for headphones. Sound material is generated from the noise of water that seeps away into different dry earths. The different earths are to be collected in different locations/landscapes, dried and then watered in the sound studio. The water seeps away in earth and leaves the sound on the surface. I capture it there and let it infiltrate ourselves via headphones. A sharp crackling in the neck. A swallowing in the forehead. Thus, the small sounds of the water will become a murmering of the synapses.

 

7 Seo Ryang Kim: Wasser 5:28 ["Water"]

When I was a child I went on a family vacation to the sea. When playing at the water's edge I was drowned by a high wave, so that water shot into my ears. It was as if the water would completely fill the space in my head. I still remember the sound of the sudden and loud intrusion of water into my head with horror. The water flooded my ears and flew out again, but what remained is a nightmarish feeling. In my composition for headphones I am articulating that experience. The sound sputters, flows through the space inside the head and picks out the destructive power of water as a central subject.

 

8 Sun-Mi Han: Who am I? 4:21

It was a rainy day in summer. On that day I asked myself a question: who am I? When I was asked by someone to state who I was, I answered with my name, without thinking about it. But when I ask myself the same question, the answer is a different one. Sun-mi Han - can a name be my ego? Names are just an index, nothing more than a denomination, a connection to the information in our heads. But what the name hides is so big that it cannot be put into a single word. With the doubts my quest for the self began. Who am I? And what about you? Who are you?

 

9 Marc Behrens: Yes, China

9:53

By far the loudest and densest urban 360° noise I have experienced in China - in the city centre traffic of Hongkong, Guangzhou and Beijing. A sound occurs almost never isolated from others. Even in interior spaces the low frequency field of traffic noise seeps in through the walls. "Yes, China" is a survey of the acoustic urban space with emphasis on such sounds and situations which bind the people's attention or enable identification with the location. Inside urban, physically aggressive noise, the head's interior space is often the only retreat. In the flowing and bass dominated sonic world of subways, motor coaches and construction sites, different sound sources of higher frequencies are able to push through: crickets, sound signals at traffic lights, steam pressure-relief valves in Beijing's 798 art zone, a priest's painfully resonant brass bell. During recording many of those sounds I worked without monitoring headphones, positioning microphones merely according to experience. When one listens in realtime to the exterior world within which one resides with open mikes and on headphones, big alienation effects will quickly show up. Loudness proportions seem distorted, shifted. Localization will change according to the employed microphone type and be limited already by the use of stereo headphones. Even when position and microphone characteristics largely coincide, the perception of the sound on location will mutate. The active mind edits the experienced and recorded sounds into a sonic world which, as it were, steals and internalizes the contours of the outer world. At a different time, different place, and for a new listener, two interior headspaces melt: the one formed by the composer and the one experienced by that listener. Both refer to two allegedly similar exterior spaces: the one experienced by the composer and the one which the listener would imagine. #

Play 46:40 min, Besenkammer - etwas Raum für Kunst 27/5/2010

Headphones: Sound Without Space

Curated for Architectural Association Independent Radio by Charles Stankievech. Part of 1 of 3 in the series Sound + Space: Headphones | Architecture | Transmission -------->   LISTEN TO THE COMPILATION  <--------- Headphones are the norm.  The new addiction replacing smoking, headphones frame the head and the perception of most urbanites today in some form or other. Whether commuting with an iPod, exercising to the radio, talking on a hands-free cellphone… or actually listening to music, headphones create a mobile and continually changing architecture that follows the listener, wrapping them in a private bubble.  As the world rapidly interfaces, overlaps and confronts the boundaries of Private and Public through technologies and legislation, headphones become a quiet and invisible site of investigation.  The audio tracks in this collection attempt to define a body of work that is fundamentally connected to the phenomenon of headphone listening.  Some work was made specifically for headphones such as Bernhard Leitner or Janet Cardiff, other work was not originally composed for headphones, but when played over headphones a unique experience of the work is created—sometimes against the original intention of the artist or at least as a surprising by-product.  While the most common thread between the works is the unique spatialisation of headphones, other attributes of headphone listening—such as intimacy and privacy—are also explored and included. Headphones: Sound Without Space stems from the research consolidated in “From Stethoscopes to Headphones: An Acoustic Spatialization of Subjectivity” in Leonardo Music Journal (MIT Press). Vol. 17. 2007. Image: Sezione di orecchio, Ex Optimis Neotreriocrum Operibus  1804.  Archivi di San Servolo. This compilation should be listened to with headphones. #

Play UNKNOWN min, Charles Stankievech 18/4/2009

No Such Thing as a Quiet Hammer

DIN The noisy neighbours and the noise musicians UPROAR The producers, the protesters and the polluters CLAMOUR The instigators and the investigators TUMULT             Vernon & Burns, thinking aloud, offer a quiet meditation on noise. Extracts from interviews with noise pollution officers from Dundee City Council's Environmental Health Department are combined with found sounds, songs, field recordings and other voices to create this experimental live radio piece. Part audio collage, part documentary this is an unorthodox investigation into attitudes towards extraneous noise and noise pollution. --- Performed and produced by Barry Burns & Mark Vernon. Website: www.meagreresource.com   Myspace:www.myspace.com/vernonandburns   e-mail:meagreresource@hotmail.com           ‘Play’CD:http://www.kormplastics.nl/Audiotoop.html --- Commissioned by Extrapool (NL) in 2005 for ‘Audiotoop' - an evening of live, performed radio plays and Hörspiel. The full programme was aired on Resonance FM in June 2008. A condensed version appears on ‘Play', a CD and publication produced by Extrapool, 2006. #

Play 28:06 min, Mark Vernon 18/3/2009

Non-Members Night Out

A number of years ago I suffered from a bout of prolonged back pain. Bad reactions to the high doses of pain killers meant social drinking was out of the question and combined with the inability to stand for longer than 10 minutes without excruciating pain this began to seriously curtail my social life. On the odd occasion I did go to the pub I would invariably leave after an hour or so. The pubs, karaoke bars and clubs became symbols of my exclusion. It was around this time that I began making recordings of the outdoor night life on my weekly shadowy walks. I was drawn to the back doors of clubs, deserted alleys behind bars, non-places where the filtered bass of the discotheque made the sense of isolation more palpable.//This soundscape, created with sounds familiar to anyone used to prowling the streets of a big city late at night, features surreptitious recordings made outside Glasgow nightclubs, skulking around back doors and fire exits in the early hours of the morning.  Despite the obvious presence of others these sounds are strangely isolating. They document only the exterior, the periphery. The listener is excluded from the exciting and lively atmospheres that can be heard at a distance through the barriers of closed doors, brick walls and back alleys. You can hear the party going on but you haven’t been invited.//These recordings also document the effects that high volumes of music and the city’s club culture have on the surrounding architecture and acoustic environment. A door frame rattles in time, but at a slight delay, to the music within. A closely miked recording of a broken but intact windowpane at the rear of one club makes the grinding together of the shards of glass audible as they vibrate in time to the bass. Microphones inserted into drainpipes amplify the audible white noise content creating warm drones; filtered higher frequencies from the music and sounds from outside are still just audible. Windows rattle in their frames under an assault of bass heavy music.//All of the acoustic effects in this piece are natural; this is a simple edit and arrangement of the untreated field recordings. --- Produced by Mark Vernon / Website: www.meagreresource.com / e-mail: meagreresource@hotmail.com --- Abridged versions of this piece have been presented at ‘Carte Blanche’, Vollevox, Brussels and ‘The Audible Picture Show’, on ‘Framework’ (Resonance 104.4FM) and Radio Deutschland. It also appears on the Vernon & Burns LP, ‘The Tune the Old Cow Died of’ (Gagarin Records). #

Play 21:50 min, Mark Vernon 7/3/2009

Bedford Square

Bedford Square Garden is in the Bloomsbury district of the Borough of Camden in London, England. It is a private park requiring a key to enter and exit. Contact microphones were attached to the fence surrounding the park. The resulting field recording is not altered other than some equalization. The primary sound is the gate shutting as key holders enter and exit. The fence faintly transmits other ambient sounds of pedestrians and traffic surrounding the park. Most people don’t have keys and simply sit surrounding the park, leaving it empty most of the time. 'Bedford Square' is a 30 minute field recording made for radio broadcast on the Architectural Association Independent Radio (AAIR). Recorded in July, 2008. Steve Bates currently lives in Montréal, Canada where he is an MFA candidate in Studio Arts at Concordia University. He works on music, radio, and installation projects with an specific interest in experimental forms of organizing sound as improvisation and as composition. Founder and 8-year director of the sound art festival, Send + Receive: A Festival of Sound, in Winnipeg, Canada, Bates' recent collaborations include 100 Lines with jake moore, and soundFIELD, an outdoor installation at the International Garden Festival, Reford Gardens/Jardins de Métis, with landscape architect Douglas Moffat. #

Play 30:00 min, Steve Bates 5/2/2009