The Sonic Archivist

I'm doing the folks over at the Echo Red conference a quick favor by posting some samples by the Sonic Archivist of Guam. We open with the resonances recorded in the hollows of the jet noise barrier, overlaid with an F-22 flyover. We then descend into some of the boarded-up buildings of the former air base, down into some caves (artificial or natural?) and emerge in the interior of the abandoned base. Listen:

A Shroud of Swiftlet-Space

The Ornithologist has posted his report over at Archinect.com.

What I think is most interesting in the report is the masking or camouflage of military space with artificial ecologies. By producing bird habitat, the military can prolong their presence. However, too successful of a habitat will lead to the birds' over-taking of the base, by activist protest or B.A.S.H.--Bird Aircraft Strike Hazard.

The Swiftlet is interesting because it uses echolocation to navigate in combination with eyesight. Bats also use echolocation but the sonar emitted is typically at frequencies higher than humans can hear.

The bird nests are edible, too. The industry for swiftlet bird nests is already on the rise in Malaysia. There is even a website which allows you to download Swiftlet sound for free. In this way you can "seed" your own swiftlet farm, broadcasting these bird calls to attract the birds to make their nests in your abandoned building (or military base, as it may be).

Swiftlet farming, like the US military, thrives on the production of ghost ecologies.

Air Conditioner No. 8

My first commissioned soundscraper has opened tonight at Brussels-based Silence Radio. It is titled Air Conditioner No. 8. There's a blurb in French that accompanies the piece. However, I'd rather offer this email I wrote to Etienne Noiseau, the sonographer-in-chief at Silence Radio.org, to introduce the piece.

Tue, Mar 30, 2010 at 11:19 PM
Dear Etienne,

Thank you for your patience. I have re-worked the piece and uploaded it.

In this latest incarnation, I am trying to do something like what the music box does but as an operation on the air conditioning sound. I am trying to move away from the gimmick for its own sake and towards the effect that I desired in the first place. If the music box was about extracting signals from the air, my new piece is about subtracting signals from the air. Tone, therefore, is less important than the background noise.

I took your advice to play with the dynamics. I thought that was a much more convincing way to make connections between these air-conditioners. I think it is like walking across a soundscape, using stairs instead of ramps to move between the sonic chambers.

I realize there was a large disconnect between what I wrote in the text and the first piece that I sent to you. I'm hoping that this piece brings the written and the aural closer together. You were right that the layer of natural sound as something always mediated by a machine--air conditioner, jet sound, or otherwise--is worth calling attention to.

The piece has grown a bit in length. I felt this was necessary to give space for listening. I felt a lot of my segments in the first take were too short. There was a choppiness to how things came together, which gave too much attention to the transition.

The first thing I say "What is the sound of air?" should really be "It is unavoidable to hear the sound of air. What I desire is to listen to air.

Regards,
Nick Sowers

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.