JrF: when & why did you become interested in field recording ?
AG: I became interested in field recording when I was studying abroad at Goldsmiths College in London. I had just been introduced to the music of Taylor Deupree and Doron Sadja and more synthesized sound in electronic music, and I was interested in the ways in which these textures seemed to reference ambient sounds without any obvious sources. Directly after this, I was enrolled in an electro-acoustic music course with John Drever, where we listened to Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien No. 1, which is an ambient recording of the seaside in a Yugoslovian village, and multiple works by Hildegard Westerkamp. Then we were set loose on London with DAT recorders and stereo microphones. I hadn’t realized until this point the potential of environmental sonic architecture, and while I was intrigued by the works we had heard, I was far more interested in sonic phenomena that could only be made audible through processing the field recordings. I was less interested in the dynamic sounds captured in a space (conversation, etc.) than the way a recording could make audible the inherent architectural properties of that space.
JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output ?
AG: I became interested in field recording when I was studying abroad at Goldsmiths College in London. I had just been introduced to the music of Taylor Deupree and Doron Sadja and more synthesized sound in electronic music, and I was interested in the ways in which these textures seemed to reference ambient sounds without any obvious sources. Directly after this, I was enrolled in an electro-acoustic music course with John Drever, where we listened to Luc Ferrari’s Presque Rien No. 1, which is an ambient recording of the seaside in a Yugoslovian village, and multiple works by Hildegard Westerkamp. Then we were set loose on London with DAT recorders and stereo microphones. I hadn’t realized until this point the potential of environmental sonic architecture, and while I was intrigued by the works we had heard, I was far more interested in sonic phenomena that could only be made audible through processing the field recordings. I was less interested in the dynamic sounds captured in a space (conversation, etc.) than the way a recording could make audible the inherent architectural properties of that space.
JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output ?
AG: My process has changed as I gain more experience. I began with the aforementioned DAT recorder, and then moved on to a second-hand minidisc recorder, and finally an edirol wav-recorder. I usually try to find a space with unusual acoustics (usually an interesting pattern of resonant frequencies) and then I process the raw recording with convolution, bandpass filtering, or spectral delay until the resonances of the space are prevalent. Then I use the processed field recordings as raw material in electronic improvisations. Lately I have been interested in capturing low-fi impulse responses (handclaps) in different spaces and convolving them with more melodic material, layered over the ambient recordings of those same spaces. Last January, I made several recordings in an abandoned warehouse in Albany and have been using that material for a while.
Jrf: are the terms 'music' & 'sound' important to you, either in the way you feel about the sounds you capture and use or in the way your work is viewed by others ?
AG: I consider the connection between sound and music in my work to be very important. One of my main goals in the use of field recordings is to draw out the melodic content, the pitch and rhythmic elements, present in ambient sounds. This could be seen, I suppose, as an attempt to use these recordings as instruments, and the resulting audio as an attempt to compose the recordings into music. Of course, there is an inherent musical element to all ambient sound, and often I find myself listening intently to some ambient sound as though it were a performance. For example, I was driving on the BQE last night, not moving very quickly because of traffic, when I began to hear pitches that didn’t fit with the music I was listening to. I turned off the CD (Unwound:Leaves Turn Inside You) and realized that a garbage truck to my left was emitting entire dissonant and strangely polyrhythmic chords on every stop and start. I was content to listen to the truck for several minutes before returning to my CD. I would say that, in this case, the transition from music to sound didn’t require any processing at all.
JrF: what effect (positive or negative) has the act of making field recordings had on the way you listen to your everyday surroundings and how has it affected the way you listen to other music / sound (if at all) ?
AG: I would say that, just as bringing a camera on a trip makes you see everything in frames and causes you to see the surrounding environment in a much more aesthetic way, so does the presence of a portable recorder make you hear everything as a potential sample for a future piece. As an architectural acoustics student, I am now influenced by both the physical sound and the visual indices of potential sound in every environment I encounter. Even without a recorder, I certainly feel that my attention to the sound of an environment has shifted since I began making tracks with field recordings. In particular, the spatial relationships of sounds always intrigue me, and it is these relationships that seem to define a space the most for me. It is my hope that with the current acoustics research I am doing for my degree (building a microphone to record 2nd-order ambisonics) I can capture more accurately and recreate these relationships in my work.
Anne has a really good track on the 'sonics of art spaces' free downloadable compilation, which can be found by clicking here
1 comment:
everything has the potential to be art... or maybe everything is art already (like in a marxist utopia) and we are just not smart enough to recognize it. which is why we need field recordings and people who use them.
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