Output details

Leverhulme Fellowship - Acoustic Ecology Website and composition

Through 2007-2008 I developed a project with the Centre for Environmental and Marine Sciences (CEMS-Hull University) funded by Leverhulme Trust. This followed a research fellowship with British Antarctic Survey (2003-4).

The research had two imperatives: to investigate new technology and field recordings as the source for composition; and to interpret the research of CEMS through acoustic ecology. Projects were established with CEMS researchers e.g. Intertidal Ecology Research Group (PI Dr. Sue Hull), and environmental pollution (Dr Magnus Johnson).

The recordings were deliberately evocative, using modified acquisition systems including binaural, ambisonic, hydrophones, and bespoke electronics to evoke a deeper sense of place and take the mind of the listener “into” the audio recording: e.g., in Spurn Head, buried hydrophones on the edge of a surf zone and throughout the recording were progressively destroyed by the sea thus placing the point-of-audition centre stage; other images included water moving under ice sheets, dead trees swaying in the wind, and the path of a river from source to busy port.

Two prominent phonography labels published the resulting collection of recordings: Aud Ralph Roas’le (Gruenrekorder, Germany, 2010) and Esk (3Leaves, Hungary, 2012)

The success of this approach to the acquisition process marks a significant advance in the representation of environmental space from a phenomenological perspective. Issues surrounding acoustic ecology, especially anthropological sound pollution, are heightened when the mind of the listener is taken to these places, to experience them beyond sound documentation. Reviews mentioned picturing the ‘Silver surface of the water undulating above us and the stone strewn bed beneath’ http://thefieldreporter.wordpress.com/2012/02/09/1616/ (accessed 28 August 2013), and imagining ‘Undercurrents of engines, low thrums that reverberate below the liquid, implying the earthen basin in which it lies.’ http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=2693 (accessed 28 August 2013).