Desert Obscura

On March 20th, 2010 Soundscrapers took part in the Atlas Obscura/BLDG BLOG expedition to the "Geoglyphs of Nowhere" a.k.a. a bunch of dirt roads northeast of California City in the Mojave Desert. I put up what I call Desert Prosthetics, a series of installations which mediate the experience of listening to ambient sound in the desert. {Please refer to my post at Archinect for the full statement.}

We camped out for three days at Red Rocks Canyon, where I did a test installation and made slight modifications to the pieces at the campground. The boyscouts sure thought I was strange. ("Do I smell spray paint?")

Obscura Day at dawn. Listen:





A small crowd gathers at the cul-de-sac of the unmade American Dream


1. SOMT: A telescoping box for changing the frequency of ambient sound.





I've done some binaural recordings around these things. In this one, your right ear will enter the box. Listen:




2. Fata Morgana: A curved box for trapping heat and producing an audio-mirage.



I pointed a shotgun microphone through this box to record people hanging out in the cul-de-sac. You'll hear the sound of Fata Morgana rotating as I swivel it to test the resonance of different peoples' voices. Listen:




3. Slowscope: A curved, telescoping box for collapsing the audio horizon.



I tested both ears for the Slowscope. Listen:




I have come to realize that even as installations in real space, at least two of these three prosthetics are actually models for something I'd like to produce on a much larger scale.

I have also left some markers on the site which denote the coordinates of a place-less cul-de-sac in a very precise way.

The Audio Cemetery at Omaha Beach

This is a quick, belated mention of two things: one, I have been commissioned to produce a sound piece for Brussels-based Silence Radio; and two, I was featured in Soundwalk's series called Editions. Soundwalk describes Editions as:

Soundwalk Editions features artists and composers who use environmental field recordings as a point of departure in their work. By recording sounds outside of the conventional studio you are in the act field recording, audibly engaged with ears that gradually refine a sonic experience, like the eye looking through a camera lens. Field recording is often synonymous with phonography, in which sound takes the place of image in documenting a location, physical act, or a natural occurrence. Drawing attention to the quality and experiential nature that can exist in the soundscapes of our environment, these works allow the viewer to have an intimate experience with the various compositional approaches practiced by each individual artist. Through listening to these recordings we have the opportunity to become aware of the various dialects that can exist in the language of field recording compositions.

In my piece, I am looking to create something at Omaha Beach, Normandy, that I feel is essential to the reading of the landscape. Even after producing this piece I am searching for a means to memorialize all of those who died on that beach. The American cemetery sits on top of a cliff as if to mark forever the Allied conquering of the beach. The only German landmarks to be found are a scattering of bunkers, and not even very formidable bunkers. So I am seeking in sound what cannot be found in visual space. Here is the direct link to my audio guide to the German cemetery at Omaha Beach: Listen.

Uncancelling the Noise of Nature

In a recent conversation with a recreation manager for Andersen Air Force Base on the US unincorporated territory of Guam, I learned something which may prove incredibly pertinent to my thesis. At Ritidian Point, the northern-most tip of the 30-mile long island, there is a wildlife center which plays in the background the recorded sounds of extinct birds. These birds became extinct by way of the Brown Tree Snake, thought to be a stow-away on a cargo ship following WWII. The snake has no natural predators on Guam, nor did the endemic species have any natural defense against them. It wasn't until the late 1960s that the populations of the endemic birds noticeably declined. (Another source mentioned that DDT also made a hit on the avian population.) Today, nine of eleven forest-dwelling species have been extirpated, including two species unique to Guam.

The remarkable thing is this: it was the Navy which gave over the sounds of the now-extinct birds. They were recording the birds in the 1950s, according to my source at Andersen, in order to cancel out the background noise in order to listen for Russian and Polish trawlers during the Vietnam War, who were in turn trying to pick up on their radar B-52s flying out of Andersen en route to torching the jungles of North Vietnam. The Navy would then jam the signals of the trawlers.

When the Cold War ended, the Navy listening post and the land at Ritidian Point was turned over to become a Federal Wildlife Preserve, and the sound recordings were thus donated. In this effort, unwittingly, the Navy preserved the sounds of the jungle that would never again be heard.

I'm in the process of looking for these sounds, but if anyone knows something about this please don't hesitate to send me a message. In the meantime, I've been going through my undocumented archives from the past year of travel and pulled up this sound, from the jungles on Okinawa. What I am interested in these nature sounds is the possibility to generate intimate spaces--an architecture--which is produced for enjoyment of the sound. Listen:

War Sounds Mashup

Do you ever wish there was a random soundtrack for every google search that you do? I might just sound like this. Listen:




I just did a simple experiment. I typed in "war" into the search engine at freesound.org to see what would pop up. I was listening to the tracks one by one, but then I started playing them on top of one another. You can play as many as you want at the same time using freesound.org's embedded player, generating an instant mashup.

In the first 15 results of "war", I was delighted by the diversity of sounds. First you get what you might expect: air raid sirens, bombers, gunfire and explosions. But also: George W Bush, angry soccer fans, a cheezy laser cannon, and a benign ship's bell from the HMS Chepstow. In the following version, I spread out the clips with about a three second offset, in the order they appeared in the search list:




Credit for the individual samples goes to: guitarguy1985, ljudman, digifishmusic, acclivity, EcoDTR, m:o, and daveincamas.


p.s. I borrow inspiration from the sound artist Chris Kubick who has used folly libraries and Supercollider to generate some pretty fascinating landscapes.