Gordon Monro - Acoustic Ecology symposium

Symposium on Acoustic Ecology

Introduction
What is acoustic ecology?
Scientific or scholarly presentations
Presentations on education
Art-related presentations
Associated events

Introduction

This is a report on the International Symposium on Acoustic Ecology, held at the Victorian College of the Arts (VCA), Melbourne, 19-23 March 2003. The organisers were Nigel Frayne, on behalf of the World Forum for Acoustic Ecology, and Roger Alsop, on behalf of the VCA. Warren Burt was "Master of Ceremonies", and there was a substantial support team providing administrative and technical support.

The Proceedings are online at http://www.acousticecologyaustralia.org/symposium2003/index.html.

Although most of the participants were from Australia, the symposium was indeed international. Murray Schafer from Canada, who is the founder of the field, gave two presentations, and there were participants from Japan, the UK, the USA, Germany, Russia, Austria, Spain, Scandinavia and New Zealand. There were 60 or so participants.

The conference proper consisted of papers, presented in the Federation Hall of the VCA, which is a well-equipped shoe-box style auditorium. In addition there were an exhibition and a concert as associated events, and an audio CD was produced as a spin-off from the exhibition. The conference proceedings were on CD-ROM.

Usual disclaimer: this is a personal report on a complex event.

What is acoustic ecology?

There was some discussion during the symposium of what acoustic ecology is, or ought to be. It appears to have four aspects:

A campaigning or crusading aspect, to identify and minimise noise pollution, and to preserve sounds characteristic of particular places and environments.

A scientific (in a broad sense) and scholarly aspect, to study how humans and other organisms relate to sound in the environment. This study encompasses the cultural meanings of sounds as well as physical acoustics and psycho-acoustics.

An educational aspect, to encourage children, and also professionals such as town planners, to become aware of sound in the environment.

An artistic aspect. This includes installations or public artworks which involve sound, and also soundscape compositions: tape works which make use of recorded sound to evoke a particular environment.

(This classification is essentially that put forward by Grant Sonnex, UK)

There was a comment that maybe the word "ecology" has outlived its usefulness. Murray Schafer said that when he started talking about acoustic ecology, he was referring only to the scientific or scholarly aspect. Now there seems to be some association with Luddite tree-huggers (my words, not Murray's). Some people and groups prefer "soundscape studies" as a more neutral term.

There was a feeling that the conference was a little light on the scientific side, but in fact the three aspects of scientific in the broad sense, educational and artistic had roughly equal representation in the presentations. Crusading talks were notably absent, except for Ray Gallon's (Canada/Spain) passionate statement about the effects of amplified sound and the sounds of motors such as compressors, in destroying the soundscapes specific to particular places.

There were over 40 presentations, and I was unable to attend them all. Comments on some of them follow.

Scientific or scholarly presentations

Norm Broner, an Australian acoustic engineer, talked about some of the projects his firm has been involved in. These include difficult problems of acoustic isolation (for example, a very noisy train line next to a concert hall), and also work on systems which can change the reverberation characteristics of a hall electronically.

Neil McLachlan (Australia) presented a remarkable paper outlining an ambitious program to improve the process of measurement and evaluation of environmental sounds, particularly annoying sounds. It emerged as a theme of the conference that current methods of measurement are totally inadequate, usually just producing a single figure for noise intensity averaged over a period of several hours. Neil's aims are to produce measures that accurately reflect human reaction to various kinds of noise, and to provide useful tools for architects and town planners.

Peggy Rismuller (Australia) talked about her ongoing study of echidnas on Kangaroo Island, South Australia. Apparently they very occasionally make vocal-like sounds, but what purposes these might serve is unknown. There is a suggestion they may communicate by low-frequency sounds.

There were several presentations on the soundscape of particular places. Perhaps the most striking was that of Kozo Hiramatsu (Japan), who talked on the soundscape of part of the old city of Kyoto. This section of the city was laid out in a Chinese-influenced design, with the better houses on the main streets and the poorer houses tucked behind, in lanes and alleyways. Now, the poorer houses have a quieter sonic environment, closer to that of rural Japan than to the city noises experienced by the better houses. For a fortnight each year the soundscape changes dramatically, because of the Gion festival. Each small neighbourhood is responsible for a huge wooden cart, two or three storeys high. Some of the carts have flute and drum bands on their upper levels. The sounds of these bands, first practising before the festival, and then being towed through the streets on the carts, is "indelibly moulded in the hearts" of the community.

Nick Evans (Australia) gave a fascinating talk comparing the metaphorical meanings of words meaning "to see" and "to hear" in Australian Aboriginal languages with the corresponding words in Indo-European languages. In the Indo-European languages the root word for seeing has led to words meaning knowledge, understanding and the like; it is common in English to say "I see", meaning "I understand". The words for hearing are generally confined much more closely to their literal meanings. In Aboriginal languages the situation is reversed: words and phrases related to knowing, understanding, cleverness and memory are derived from a root meaning "to hear".

There were some comments during the symposium about the complete dominance of vision over hearing in our culture, with suggestions that it is relatively recent, possibly arising from widespread literacy. But Evans' paper suggests that it is much older than that, being built into our (Western) languages.

Presentations on education

Hildegard Westerkamp (Canada) gave us some practical experience by leading symposium participants on two "sound walks". The only rule on a sound walk is not to talk; the purpose is to listen to the acoustic environment.

The first walk was along busy St Kilda Road, which also has tram tracks, to the Yarra bank, and then back to the VCA between and through the buildings in this area, which is in general an arts precinct. We walked into a café, sampled the muzak and walked out again. There was also much higher-class muzak in the foyer of the concert hall. The loudest noise was that of a street-cleaning machine in a cavernous space at the edge of the river.

The second soundwalk was into the Melbourne Botanic Gardens, which are near to the VCA. City noises were still present, but the dominant sound was that of the enormous colony of fruit bats. In discussion afterwards it was pointed out that the fruit bats are only there because Melbourne is. A city is warmer than the surrounding countryside, and before urbanisation the area was too cold for the bats to stay permanently; also Melburnians have planted many "native" trees, native not to Melbourne but to NSW and Queensland. So the bats now have a warm place to stay and plenty of their favourite foods. The large numbers (up to 20,000) are damaging the trees in the Botanic Gardens, so attempts are being made to get the bats to move by playing loud noises at them. We didn't hear these noises, but a sign assured us that they are scientifically tested and satisfy health and safety regulations.

Helen Dilkes (Australia) presented work she had done with kindergarten children, aged 4–5. They went on a kind of soundwalk, drew and talked about the sounds they heard, and constructed a map of the area and the sounds in it. (The idea of the map apparently came from the children themselves.) The children had access to a tape recorder and seemed perfectly at home on either side of the microphone.

Murray Schafer (Canada) had been working for some days with children from a local primary school, and he brought along a whole class, in years 5–6. The children stayed focused and interested for nearly two hours as they showed us Murray's "sound games". They were asked to bring "an interesting sound". Some brought toys that made funny noises; some brought kitchen utensils and the like that could be scraped or shaken. One boy had a wok partly filled with water and a spatula as a beater.

In one game, each child was given a number at random from 1 to 4. The number ones were to be cows, the number twos sheep, and so on. Then they all put on blindfolds, each child made the noise of his or her animal, and they had to find the other children representing the same animal. The cacophony was amazing, but they did pretty well. In a much quieter game, Murray produced some A3 paper sheets, and got the children to pass these around, trying not to make any sound at all. The adults tried a couple of the games too, and this one is surprisingly difficult. In another game, the children sat in a semicircle, and a single sheet of paper was passed around. Each child had to make a sound with the paper, different from all the preceding sounds. Since there were about 30 children, this became very challenging near the end.

At the professional development level, Per Hedfors (Sweden) showed some software being developed for landscape architects and urban planners. It will allow them to move around a plan or map, hearing the sounds that would be heard at different locations. Per referred to the work of the architect Christopher Alexander on "pattern languages", and he hopes to develop pattern languages for what he called "sonotopes", which are like soundscapes but also take into account the expected listening modes of the people in a given environment.

Lex Brown (Australia) also discussed setting of objectives usable by town planners, including sounds we do want and sounds we do not want. He gave an example of a fountain in a park. (By the way, both Lex and Per Hedfors indicated that it would never occur to most landscape architects that different fountains could have different sounds.) Near the fountain, we might specify that moving water should be the dominant sound heard. This is quite different from the traditional specification in terms of sound pressure levels. If there is a street crossing near the fountain which is used by blind people, we might specify that the fountain not block out the aural cues they need to cross the road safely.

These educational presentations were certainly not overtly crusading, but there is no doubt that participating in the activities and programs described will help to raise the acoustic-ecological consciousness of the participants.

Art-related presentations

Anton Hassell and Neil McLachlan (Australia) gave an update on their just intonation bells, and in particular on an installation on the Yarra bank near the centre of Melbourne. The installation is played by computer, controlled by a MIDI file, and Anton and Neil hope that soon composers will be able to make compositions and send them to be performed. They have sound samples of the bells available, to assist composers. Their website is at www.ausbell.com (go to "The Federation Bells"). I did go to see this installation when I was in Melbourne, but unfortunately I couldn't be there when the bells were playing.

Scott Smallwood and Stephan Moore (USA) talked about some performances they had done, literally on the street. They set up a microphone to record the ambient sound, processed the sound in real time on laptops as an improvisatory performance, and recorded the results onto cassette, which were sold or given to spectators. The idea was that passers-by would be able to compare the actual soundscape they had heard with the improvisation based on it. The spectators could not hear the improvisation as it was being produced, to stop people "performing" for the microphone, though in one case it was possible to listen to the improvisation through headphones placed well away from the microphone. This presentation caused a lot of discussion, including suggestions for further development.

Catherine Hocking (Australia) presented an attempt at a framework for analytical writing about sound installations. Traditional musical analysis is inapplicable to installations, so Catherine went back to first principles, outlining an analysis based on the categories of Form (the overall form of the installation, including the specification of the sound component), Space (how the installation uses space, including both physical objects that may be present and the spatial distribution of sound) and Time (how the installation changes over time; how the audience interacts with the installation over time).

Several artists talked about projects they had been involved in. Some of those presenting were Ros Bandt (Australia), talking about installations where the wind provides the sound; Jo Thomas (UK) presenting her sound-and-video piece Angel, with a very refined "acousmatic" soundtrack; and Warren Burt (Australia) describing the different ways in which his pieces have engaged with the environment or made use of environmental sounds.

Many of the symposium participants were artists, and the symposium had a strong artistic flavour. Grant Sonnex pointed out that in the classification above of aspects of acoustic ecology, the artistic aspect is the odd one out. Nonetheless, artists have been leading figures in the acoustic ecology movement since it began.

Associated events

The concert

A concert in was organised by Lawrence Harvey and Tim Kreger, and held in a rather strange space, the "BMW Edge Atrium" in the new and controversial Federation Square complex (no relation to the VCA's Federation Hall). The Edge Atrium is basically a shoebox auditorium, but the walls are mostly glass, and bulge into the space in polyhedral intrusions. All the surfaces are hard (the seating is unpadded wood, fixed in place) except the ceiling, which does have sound-absorbing material. There is a lot of space around the seats, and this facilitated the placing of a multi-speaker system (I think 16 speakers). The main problem with the hall was that sound from outside was audible. This wasn't too bad during the concert, but apparently during the set-up amplified drumming was going on outside, and it was impossible to set levels. This, coupled with a bad place for the mixing desk (presumably because the seats could not be moved) meant that some parts of the concert were too loud, particularly unfortunate for an acoustic ecology conference.

Some of the pieces were composed as multi-track pieces and others were stereo pieces diffused over the multiple loudspeakers. One piece was apparently an unmodified recording of natural sounds, an underwater recording of Weddell seals made in Antarctica by Doug Quinn (USA). (It wasn't clear if this was a single straight recording or a collage.) The sounds were extraordinary, and apparently very loud in the natural environment.

The other pieces were all more or less "composed", but all used environmental sounds as their base material, subjected to varying degrees of arrangement and transformation. The centrepiece of the concert was Island by Barry Truax (Canada), six scenes from "a magical island of the mind", with water, wind, bird and insect sounds. Another fairly naturalistic work was Talking Rain, by Hildegard Westerkamp (Canada), originally composed for radio. It represents the rainy environment around Vancouver, incorporating recordings made more than 20 years ago for the World Soundscape Project as well as more recent recordings.

The only Australian work programmed was Canopies: chimerical acoustic environments by Lawrence Harvey. This is a concert version of an installation, a promenade along the banks of the Yarra with loudspeakers overhead, and the sounds were designed to be heard against a background of city noises. They are mostly high-pitched sounds, much less identifiable than those in the works already mentioned, and arranged in dense complexes. The most extreme transformations were in Jo Thomas's piece Angels, mentioned above (the concert contained only the soundtrack, not the accompanying video). These are certainly not chocolate-box angels: as the program note says "Some scream with Arch strength...".

The concert was rounded out with three short soundscapes by Gabriele Proy (Austria). The concert presented substantial works and was a welcome addition to the symposium.

The exhibition

A two-part exhibition, under the name "Hearing Place", was organised in association with the symposium. Ros Bandt and Iain Mott were the curators. One part of the exhibition was on the VCA campus, and consisted mainly of an "audiotheque", with over 60 pieces of sound art available for listening on headphones. Also at this site was Voicing the Murray, one of Ros Bandt's "spirit of place" installations with voices coming from containers, and an ambitious work involving several slide projectors by Hildegard Westerkamp and Florence Debeugny (Canada). Unfortunately this last work suffered from persistent technical problems.

The second part of the exhibition was some distance off the VCA campus, at the Yarra Sculpture Gallery in Abbotsford. All the works involved sound in one way or another. For me the most striking was a wave-powered organ by Cameron Robbins and John Turpie, originally installed on the coastline of the Great Australian Bight, where the waves forced air into organ pipes. The exhibition showed some of the pipes and a video of the installation. The sound was an eerie wailing, partly a reference to the ghosts of the Aboriginal people massacred near the spot in the 1840s. The most elaborate work was Love is a Wonderful Thing by Gillian Chaplin and Les Gilbert, consisting largely of small cabinets containing various objects, which played sounds as the visitor approached. This was meant to represent a "collection of private thoughts and memories".

A web page on the exhibition is at http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000431b.htm .

In addition a CD with ten works from the audiotheque was produced, and is available from Move Records (Move MD 3275, www.move.com.au).

Overall the symposium was very interesting and worthwhile. The organisers are to be congratulated for putting in the huge amount of work necessary to enable such an event to happen in Australia.