Last week it was brought to my hands a little instructional book called “A little guidebook for home listening (2020)” by Ruth Anderson, Sam Auinger, David Behrman, Katrinem, Annea Lockwood, Bruce Odland, and Liz Phillips. It was meant to be a guide for sound artists to find their space inside the sonic world and their motif, followed by a list of practical exercises to do at home or outside individually.
The first exercise was called “sound portrait: hearing a person” and was developed by Ruth Anderson, an American music composer, orchestrator, teacher, and flutist. Ruth suggests that music can explain a person, and vice-versa if we put ourselves in a darkened room, in a comfortable positing, with a song picked by us and by forcing the image of a loved person of ours. she says that if you complete this procedure:
“(…) you will find after, an understanding of the person you did not have, and a personal relationship to the music. the music, too, will be known.”
Lately, I’ve been listening to Boy Harsher’s lesser man EP (2014), suggested by my sound artist friend Inês França (@in.fra.es on Instagram), and decided to pick one of the songs of this project (“pain” – track no. 3) to do my “hearing person experiment”
The result: a weird experience in unveiling a person that I know and care about. now I strongly believe that i don’t know her. The whole experience felt like a video clip – strong and vivid images crossed my mind of something that may not be the reality. I think that i’m not able to say that this song changed or revealed explanations of this person, but I definitely can say that it changed her hues and textures, the feelings and emotions attached, and her characteristics. Music didn’t create/explained the person I know. Instead, it created a new one.
The second exercise that i liked the most was “my personal sound space – an exploration by ears” designed by sam auinger, an austrian sonic thinker. sam suggests the exploring of space through sound using a pebble to answer the question “why we hear what we hear and how it makes us feel?”. The experiment is tripartite with the following tasks: pebble meets objects (touch different materials in your room with the pebble and find interesting patterns, differences between textures, etc.); pebble falls on a surface (let the pebble fall in the ground and let the sound absorb the room. Try different surfaces); pebble meets an arranged situation (combination with the previous two tasks).
“it is essential that our imagination leads us and that the game forecasting the change in the sound is part of this exercise. by doing this, we will develop a kind of an inner ear and the ability to hear the sounding properties of objects and spaces and to feel their inherent atmospheres in advance – which allows us to
act more according to our needs.”
My response: this experience indeed opened some windows in my sound perception. It feels like a mindful experience through space and sound, because suddenly you can only care and think about the different sound that the pebble can produce. trying to identify different types of sound textures and tones. It feels the same as looking at a forest and trying to decipher all types of green there are according to each tree. or looking into grains of sand and try to identify as many colors as one can. I think I’ve underestimated the sound qualities and let the visual world dominate my senses From now on, objects have both sound and visual silhouettes.
Lastly, Liz Phillips, an american sound artist, appeals to our selective memory to remember the sounds that we recollect from a determined place and time and from that create a sonic world with the sounds that we most love and appreciate hearing. this was, by far, the exercise that put me more in a sound perspective.
our senses tell us so much if we are present and still and open.
my response:
I grew up in the Portuguese city of Porto and its surroundings, and now that I think about my selective memory I do hold in my hard disk loads of sound memories of my hometown and its different textures. as an example, the other day I was searching sounds for fun in freesounds.com, I come across myself with a zoom h6 field recordings of Porto. This same mysterious recordist named 20020 had +100 recordings of the city in different sound landscapes. I thought to myself “these recordings out of context could be somewhere else”. I later heard a recording of Porto’s bus 600 line, the bus that I would take from school to my house – it was the most nostalgic experience that I had because the sound that the bus produced was exactly the way I remembered it. it was not only the sound of the engine but the sound of the walls shaking, the deteriorated pavement, people’s voices. this reflects the importance of sound. the 600 line bus sound is unique because of its patterns – human, technological, and environmental – and, for me, the emotional connection I have
I also remember my walks with my grandfather near the river of his village and we would hear this strange animal sound that we couldn’t decipher it was a reptile or a bird. Fifteen years passed and my ignorance towards that noise was maintained. it was a peep sound similar to a cuckoo but yet more rhythmic and electrical like a commutator. this year, during quarantine, I began doing research on this sound by talking with the people from the village. no one knew. as a birder, I knew that it couldn’t be a common bird, so I decided to give a shot at the reptiles. at end of 3 weeks, I discovered the sound and I immediately fell in love with that sound, becoming one of my favorite sounds. It was a midwife toad.