Music of Sound

Nicely cut/composed!

Soundscapes – by Ace Norton from IE HAGY on Vimeo.

Happy New Year to you – wherever & however you celebrated it!
My strangest New Year (2000) involved me falling off a small balconey & doing a serious spiral break of the tibia bone in my leg… and of course as soon as the tibia broke, the little fibula bone followed suit… & despite it being decades since I did a first aid course, my first question after I regained sentience was to ask if soemone could check to make sure the bone wasnt protruding & I wasnt in the process of bleeding to death! Funny what you remember & what you can recall when it really matters… and of course I do still remember the sound as each bone broke… I was checked into Christchurch hospital 2am New Years day, 2000 & was operated on later that afternoon – ever since I have been part robot, thanks a large piece of titanium now living inside my leg… I get better radio reception ever since but have to avoid strong magnets…
Anyway, enough morbidity – this New Year was much more pleasant – I spent New Years day doing what I love; spending time in the environment & recording sounds I just KNOW are going to be very very useful for a specific project….

We headed off to Castlepoint, a few hours from Wellington over on the East Coast (click image for larger version)

I have been to Castlepoint a few times in the past & I had a memory (& a mono recording) of a sound that I knew could be a key element for an aspect of the next film project I start on Jan 5th… The reef you can see way over behind the light house has one big crack in it, so when the tide is right waves come crashing through this very confined crack & spill over into the lagoon on the right… Heres a point of view shot:

It is the rush of water & energy through such a confined space that I wanted to capture… and that involved getting wet occasionally, but only a bit, as that reef is treacherous & while I dont mind the occasional swim, my mic & recorder most definitely does not! Of course every wave was different & so I recorded probably half an hour of material, doing seperate record files as i focused on different aspects of the sound….

So whats it sound like? Well I’m saving the lovely stereo 96k recordings for the film, but heres an example mono recording from my previous visit:

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Can you hear the potential? the containment? the approach & the impact? the decay?

While we were there we climbed up above the lighthouse & I shot a 360 panorama which I will convert to a QT VR sooner or later… and I’ll attach it here when I do, but for now heres a low rez version of the stitched photos – click the thumbnail pano below for the slightly less low rez one (the high rez is 6MB)

ah summer! its the start of a good year – I can feel it in my bones, even the titanium augmented one!

As I dont have much free time in which to write much here for a while, I thought I’d turn it into a photoblog for a day… this series is called ‘Postcards from my Rycote’

Lake Te Anau, Fiordland


Takaka, Golden Bay


Cosy Nook, Southland


Jerusalem, Wanganui


West Coast, near Farewell Spit


Mid-Canterbury East Coast


Echo Point, Western Inlet, Takaka


Totaranui Beach, Takaka


Oreti Beach, Invercargill


Bluff, Invercargill


Orepuki Beach, Southland


Oreti Beach, Invercargill


Jesusalem, Wanagnui


Why? Because it was there!

Check his site out here and interesting he uses the Neumann KU-81i Dummy Head binaural mic….

I’ve just started reading a book which is actually written by quite a few sound & music liminaries under the loose topic of Music & Nature. It is edited by David Rotherberg and Marta Ulvaeus and is divided into four conceptual sections, along with an audio CD of examples….

So far its interesting; probably not one to read from cover to cover as the ideas and attitudes are so wide ranging that some instantly appeal while others cross the line into predominantly theoretical or whimsical… but to each their own! Heres a couple of quotes that appealed to me as I was having a flick through it:

From ‘Piano Pieces’ by Russell Sherman: “To play the piano is to consort with nature. Every mollusk, galaxy, vapor or viper, as well as the sweet incense of love’s distraction, is within the hands and grasp of the pianist. The result may be a mess or a blessing, but too often resembles a de facto hand-me-down, a vestigal imitation, a weary if wily synthetic.
Sound is the ether which sustains and infuses the universe. But not the one isolated sound, always groupings and multiples of sound. A single sound is but a vanity, a betrayl of communion and community. the presumed beauty of a single tone is rather like Helen without Troy: a narcotic with dreams…”

And from: ‘Nature, Sound Art and the Sacred’ by David Dunn: “Attentive listening to the sounds around us is one of the most venerable forms of meditative practice. It has been used to concentrate awareness on where and what we are and to quiet the incessant chatter of the mind. What we hear from other forms of life and the environment they reside in is information that is unique and essential about patterns of relationship in context. It is an experiential basis from which we can shape an understanding of what Bateson has called the sacred: the integrated fabric of mind that envelops us.”

And Rothenberg reflecting on a recording he contributed to the CD: “… to speak of anything as ‘a piece of music’ is to indulge in a convenient fiction. Music is not a score on a library shelf, its not the sound produced by a piano or an orchestra or a computer. Music is an activity, a particularly creative way of listening. The words ‘composer,’ ‘performer,’ and ‘audience’ enable us to distinguish different roles or perspectives within the context of this activity, but they must never distract us from the essential creative contribution of each participant…”

Preview the book here or at amazon, meanwhile here is the table of contents with authors listed:

Table of Contents
• Introduction: Does Nature Understand Music?

• I. Roots of Listening
• Hazrat Inyat Khan, The Music of the Spheres
• Rainer Maria Rilke, Primal Sound
• John Cage, Happy New Ears
• John Cage, Diary: Emma Lake Music Workshop 1965
• Tim Hodgkinson, An Interview with Peirce Schaeffer
• Evan Eisenberg, Deus ex Machina
• . Murray Schafer, Music and the Soundscape
• Tsai Chih Chung, The Music of the Earth

• II. Wild Echoes
• Rafi Zabor, From The Bear Comes Home
• Steve Lacy, Sax Can Moo…
• Russell Sherman, from Piano Pieces
• Jaron Lanier, Music, Nature, and Computers: A Showdown
• David Dunn, Nature, Sound Art, and the Scared
• David James Duncan, My one Conversation With Collin Walcott
• Michael Ondaatje, from Coming through Slaughter

• III. The Landscape of Sound
• Steve Erickson, from Rubicon Beach
• Claude Schryer, The Sharawadji Effect
• Pauline Oliveros, Sonic Images
• Pauline Oliveros, The Poetics of Environmental Sound
• Brian Eno, Ambient Music
• Hildegard Westerkamp, Speaking from Inside the Soundscape
• Douglas Quin, Toothwalkers
• Francisco Lopez, Blind Listening
• David Toop, from Exotica
• Robert Schneider, from Brother of Sleep

• IV. Many Natures, Many Cultures
• John Luther Adams, The Place Where You Go to Listen
• Toru Takemitsu, Nature and Music
• Steven Feld, Lift-Up-Over Sounding
• Eric Salzman, Sweet Singer of the Pine Barrens
• Bernie Krause, Where the Sounds Live
• Junichiro Tanizaki, from “A Portrait of Shunkin”

• V. The Disc of Music and Nature