On 24 and 25 October 2024, the inaugural symposium of the Study-Group-in-the-Making “Multispecies Sound and Movement Studies” took place in the International Council for Traditions of Music and Dance (ICTMD) at Nuremberg University of Music. I was invited to present ‘Sonic Pond Dipping: Collaborating With The Sounds of Aquatic Plants’.
It was delivered using my Sonic Pond Dipping workshops as a template; the idea was to take people on a journey through underwater sounds, starting with common marine recordings and leading, inevitably, to the pond. Scheduled to be the last presentation of the day I was surprised that, despite a varied programme, mine was the first to highlight more-than-human sounds which were distinctly ‘beyond human’ perception. Others tended to focus on communication between canines, cetaceans, and birds.
Sonic Pond Dipping workshops encourage participative intervention. They aim to defamiliarise the landscape, not by aesthetic manipulation, but by close observation [ref]1 . This has become a commonality between my listening and compositional practices. The hydrophone presents a focal point within the water which I have tended to offer ‘as is’ in the form of piece of living music, somewhere between documentation and composition. The audio is only subtly adjusted in EQ to highlight key tones and perhaps spatialised to provide definition. Perhaps it should more accurately be described as ‘arranging’ (flower arranging?!). The pond as a microcosm of sonic inspiration, echoing ecologist Stephen Forbes 1887 seminal paper: “The lake as a microcosm”2.
Quantised Landscapes
Musical quantisation is the equivalent of straightening a river, offering a metaphor for disassociation with nature. Focussing on recordings made for the album With Ears Underwater, collected near Sunderland’s Nissan factories, I took Luigi Russolo’s claim that “if we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent”3 and proposed that his comment is a result of the growing anthropogenic noise and the Industrial Revolution’s desire for humans to separate themselves from nature.
Fast-forward a few decades and we find electronic/urban genres of music (including Industrial, of course) echoing the monotony of factory rhythms, the Kraftwerkian ‘Man-Machine’4 where quantised rhythms shift around grid-like patterns. Erase meanders and we delete a habitat in which species thrive. The fast-flowing waters that are channelled by the removal of ‘imperfections’ (read: ‘less-economical’) are not favoured by all. There is need to slow down. The news today reports flooding in Valencia, Spain5 where narrow streets became these fast-flowing channels resulting in major loss of life. Restoring river bends can help reduce risk of flooding. Does ‘humanising’ beats bring us closer to nature? (Should that be ‘non-humanising’ beats…?)
Listening to the glitchy complex rhythms of aquatic plants brings us back home, to the waters from which we first emerged. Do we have some rhythmic memory that was passed down from the pulsating beats of early macrophytes? Might the excitement people feel during loud rock concerts or overpowered club PA systems be traced right back to how we sensed beats with our body as vibrations passed through water? (To be continued…). Definitely asking more questions than answering them.
Symposium Link: https://www.hfm-nuernberg.de/en/news/detail/why-more-than-human-musicking-now
- Knickerbocker, S. (2012). Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language (referring to poet Elizabeth Bishop) ↩︎
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Alfred_Forbes ↩︎
- Art of Noises, (1913) – https://www.italianfuturism.org/manifestos/the-art-of-noise/ ↩︎
- Kraftwerk. The Man-Machine – Kling Klang (1978) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Man-Machine ↩︎
- https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/oct/31/spain-floods-valencia-death-toll-three-days-mourning [accessed Oct 31, 2024] ↩︎