Gå inden døre 1Gå inden døre 2recorded by Morten Søndergaard  

Gå inden døre 1Gå inden døre 2Faren er forbirecorded by Morten Carlsen 

Gå inden døre 1Gå inden døre 2Faren er forbirecorded by Rasmus Holmboe 

Gå inden døre 1 Gå inden døre 2 Bonus sirensrecorded by Jeppe Just Christensen 

Gå inden døre 1 Gå inden døre 2 Faren er forbirecorded by Rudiger Meyer 

  Gå inden døre 1 Gå inden døre 2 Faren er forbirecorded by Juliana Hodkinson 

  Gå inden døre 1Gå inden døre 2Faren er forbirecorded by Jesper Andersen 

  Hvorend du er, d. 6. maj 2009, kl. 12 … tryk på REC!!! Hvert år, 1. onsdag i maj, afprøver Beredskabsstyrelsen sin sirenevarsling over hele Danmark. Det er i år anledning til en feltoptagelse-event. d. 6. maj 2009, som koordineres via denne blog. Idéen er, at så mange lydinteresserede som mulige optager sirenerne, rundt omkring i København og hele landet, d. 6. maj 2009, fra kl. 11.55 til kl. 12.05, når sirenerne afprøves næste gang. Således bliver byens og landets lyd - før, under og efter varslingen - dokumenteret flest mulige steder fra. Optag 10 minutters lyd, inkl. den kraftige sirenevarsling. Helst fra et højtstående eller åbent sted. Er du på frit fod, kan du på forhånd få oplyst en håndfuld sireneplaceringer i København ved at skrive til contact(at)julianahodkinson.net. Ellers, lav din optagelse lige der hvor du er. Der er mere end 1.000 sirener fordelt over hele landet, og de kan høres over 80% af befolkningsarealet, så du har en god chance for at fange en sirenelyd. Du kan uploade din lydoptagelse her på bloggen (ved at indsætte link til egen .mp3 webadresse), eller sende på en mail som fx .wav fil til contact(at)julianahodkinson.net, og så vil den blive uploaded. (Du vil blive fuldt kreditteret, hvis optagelsen bruges i anden sammenhæng.) Alternativt, kan du komme forbi til champagne og kage direkte efter sirenevarsling d. 6. maj, hos Holland House på Refshalevej 110A, Kbh., kl. 12.30-13.30, hvor du kan bytte lyde/uploade din optagelse i en fælles lydmappe. (Husk, at tjekke dit lydudstyr dagen inden!) God fornøjelse!  

  You can hear Francisco López live outdoors at the FULL PULL festival in Malmö on Sunday:STARFIELD SIMULATION | SCANIAPARKEN 2008LIVE: FRANCISCO LÓPEZ, BIRGIT ULHERSCANIAPARKEN, MALMÖ, SEP 7, 17-19 Be prepared to wear a blindfold! FULL PULL is a festival of electronic experimental music and sound in the Öresund region, across a large network of galleries, organisations, and venues.

Francisco López is an artist who has worked with field recordings for many years. Springing at first from recordings made in connection with his parallel career as a microbiologist, López has worked towards - and partly away from -  a particularly extreme acousmatic variant which he calls ‘absolute concrète music’. In his essay ‘La Selva‘, he addresses a range of representational issues in relation to field recordings - including the difference between bioacoustic and ambient field recordings, and also the question of ‘realism’ in relation to sound reproduction.

Læs resten af dette indlæg »

 So, responding to Eric’s comment (buried deep in Kreutzfeldt’s sonic diary), here are the pictures to match the sound of the church service together with my son Magnus’ running footsteps from the plaza outside the church. (You can hear my pocket camera capturing these pics.) A couple of sonic postcards from 2006, delayed in the post …  

Carrying on from our dialogue The sound of shopping, here’s a link to Jacob Kreutzfeldt’s diary from his research trip to Japan last month, in which he documents 26 days of listening to Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto - including a sound picnic, and a visit to one of my favourite sonic locations worldwide: the nightingale floor in Nijo-jo.

 Nearly time for rehearsals to start on my new giant orchestral miniature, WE’D JUST GOT BACK FROM OUTER SPACE, WHEN THERE WAS A KNOCK AT THE KITCHEN DOOR. Amongst other things, the piece includes samples of street noise from Shanghai, some of which I harvested on my trip last year (see Shanghai Trip).(… “other things” being: children’s toys, kitchen utensils, music-boxes, 2 shengs and … an orchestra)The concert is 11th May, at Shanghai Grand Theatre, with Shanghai Symphony Orchestra conducted by Terje Mikkelsen.

This is the fish stall at the centre square of the Ishibashi shopping arcade, that Jacob was talking about.
And here are two recordings:

I absolutely agree with you, Jacob, about the difference between the Nordic/European concept (and reality) of public space and other ways of conceiving and using public areas. In Europe, public space is a neatly well-ordered democratic square where there is room for everyone, and Habermas might come walking past any minute … there are trees and flowers lending a pastoral gesture, and monuments to remind us of our past, maybe there’s a sculpture or elegant light-design, and there are strict rules controlling signage, advertising, etc. Whereas in Japan, public spaces often seem like a random intersection of individually-determined and often mobile or temporary zones that could be squashed into the space of the distance between an i-pod listener’s ears, or diffused over large areas with megaphones and huge advertising animations.

I can see why Deleuze & Guattari’s reflections on territory as transient and dynamic are very fruitful for your analyses of Japanese urban space. Can you say a bit more about this chapter in Mille Plateaux, where they set out their ideas, and the importance of the cry in both establishing and dissolving territorial relations?

À propos pedestrian crossing signals: Jacob Kreutzfeldt has analysed these and many other urban Japanese sound phenomena in his research on acoustic territoriality. At one of Kreutzfeldt’s lectures on the subject a couple of years ago, I was fascinated by his analysis of a melancholy low-pitched Japanese crosswalk signal, bringing together reflections on traditional melodies as well as cultural specifics in Japanese pedestrians’ use of urban space (for instance, those mega-crossings, where all the traffic stops simultaneously for pedestrians to walk in all directions at once).

More recently, Jacob Kreutzfeldt has embarked on an in-depth analysis of the interaction of amplified sound-design with other sonic events in a suburban shopping arcade in the Ishibashi district of Osaka - one which is perhaps typical of many similar arcades in Japan. He presented some of this work at a recent seminar on Sound and the City at CRASSH in Cambridge.

We’ve agreed to blog about Jacob’s research over the coming days.

Jacob, do you want to start by saying a bit about this arcade, and the way that recorded sound is used?

Here’s another variant of the sonic postcard: Marc Weidenbaum’s Tokyo travelog, in which the city is described from the aural point of view … through photos and verbal description. That’s to say, you have to imagine the sounds yourself, including recalls of musical associations (Sakamoto, Takemitsu, Yoko Ono, etc.).

Corner of Esmarchstrasse/Hufelandstrasse, Berlin

I just came across this website, advertising LyreBird, a contribution by product designer Jessica Corr, to the Conflux festival in New York last September.

Like its organic counterpart, the digital pendant registers its sonic surroundings with small solos that it repeats in other, new surroundings. Corr has designed a small USB digital recorder necklace that records 1 to 2 minutes of sound randomly as the wearer walks around in the city/festival, up to a total of 60 minutes. These soundbite recordings can then be uploaded and listened to as - the designer proposes - souvenirs of the city experience.

It seems like a playful parallel to Deleuze & Guattari’s quirky ponderings on birdsong and territoriality in ‘the music chapter’ of Mille Plateaux, namely, ‘1837: de la ritournelle’. D&G go into the territorial aspect of birdsong at some length, starting with “the role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a territorial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory” and moving by way of the 18 birdsongs in Messiaen’s Chronochromie, through the wren’s “music box refrain”, functions of nesting, courtship and pairing, via Australian grass finches and chaffinches, to the stagemaker*.

Whilst they acknowledge that “many birds are receptive to the songs of other species, if they are exposed to them during the critical period, and will produce the alien songs later on”, they don’t cite the example of the lyrebird. But as with most concepts in French post-structuralist thinking, the Deleuzian motif of territorialisation is linked by a nice dichotomy to its opposite, deterritorialisation. This seems to be neatly manifested in Corr’s LyreBird, where the main outcome is the take-away aspect of the recordings, the fact that they can orientate one’s memory of a specific urban area, and a specific festival experience, through repeatable soundclips.

Indeed, the Conflux festival is partnered with rhizome.org - an arts network that’s about as Deleuzian as it gets - so this is probably not too much to read into Corr’s audio-souvenir pendant.

*I only have D&G’s book in English (’A thousand plateaus: capitalism & schizophrenia’), so I have no idea what the level of wordplay is in the name of “the stagemaker, the magic bird or bird of the opera”). Does anyone have the French word for this bird, or an alternative English translation?

Contemporary music and sound art are often concerned with the transgression of borders - social, perceptual, aesthetic, conventional, historical, instrumental, registral, etc. But rarely
so explicitly as in Yannis Kyriakides‘ chamber opera The Buffer Zone. Here, the border is the UN Buffer Zone in Cyprus, in place since 1964.

Scored for baritone/speaker, cello, piano and electronics, the work is a collaboration with video artist HC Gilje and director/choreographer Andre Gingras. I’ve only heard this opera on CD, but even in that format, the mix of sound-sources - from the randomly-recorded but carefully-selected, to the electronically-manipulated and on to the classically-formed - is surprising and compelling. Birds tweeting on a deserted buffer-zone meadow create a kind of faux-pastoral aura; the slow speech of an actor narrating from transcripts of interviews with UN soldiers posted on the buffer zone is both personal and distanced; radio transmissions chart the rise of tension in a situation where the soldier issues warnings to a man entering unauthorised into the buffer zone (the key moment in the dramatic development of the opera) …

Læs resten af dette indlæg »

Continuing the China theme, there are some more field recordings (from Beijing and Kunming) on Toke Odin’s website. The Beijing recordings are ambient urban, whilst the Kunming recordings are more in the ethnomusicographic end of audio fieldwork.

Here are a few sonic postcards from a recent trip to Shanghai.black roof Læs resten af dette indlæg »

Tomorrow I’m performing with Jennifer Walshe at the SPOR festival in Århus, in a piece that we devised together on the initiative of the curators, Anne Marqvardsen and Anna Berit Asp Christensen. We found a couple of days to meet in Berlin, having never met before, and started off by improvising in iTunes with each our own soundbank of field recordings.

chinese new year celebrations in New York, silk market tradersin Beijing, a church service spilling out onto the plaza outside…

Læs resten af dette indlæg »

An e-mail I got from the sound designer ahead of a workshop I attended a few weeks ago makes it all seem quite straightforward. I had said that in lieu of using a musical instrument, I wanted to tackle improvisation using field recordings.

Dear Juliana,
Yes, there will be access to a portable MD recorder and mic if you want to create your own field recordings - and there are plenty of fields surrounding the College…
Looking forward to meeting you at the weekend,
Paul.
Læs resten af dette indlæg »

Welcome to a blog about field recordings. Over the coming weeks and months I’ll be blogging here with my thoughts and activities on making and using field recordings in sound art contexts.

In days gone by, field recordings were the domain of the –ologists. The term still conjures up images of entrepreneurial wisdom-seekers, schlepping unwieldy recording equipment through jungles and swamps, in search of knowledge about exotic peoples, species and habitats. Ornithologists, ethnomusicologists, anthropologists.

But today, more and more musicians and sound artists are accumulating their own personal sound-banks of field recordings.
Læs resten af dette indlæg »