I’m continuing my artist research into field recording practitioners. I’m attempting to go through their ways of working and create experiments around each practitioner’s practice. Hopefully after doing a few of them consider how I can situate myself within them and choose what I wish to do for the practical element. I already did peter Cusack and his work from Sounds from Dangerous places.
A project I’m interested in is Annea Lockwoods Hudson river sound map. I read about it in the book In the Field The Art of Field Recording. Afterwards, I listened to the album and found it captivating. It’s simple and very little in terms of editing but it intrigued me with what sound can offer us in terms of communicating our environment. I wondered perhaps what the Thames sound like? Annea explains that rivers have different sounds, and her journey along the Hudson River was not just about recording the river but the people that use and live in the river. The different places of interest. I also listened to her other river sound map. A Sound Map of the Danube.
On the video, there was this comment.
Notes by Annea Lockwood: Between the winter of 2001 and the summer of 2004, I made five field-recording trips, moving slowly down the Danube from the sources in the Black Forest through Germany, Austria, Slovakia, Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania to the great delta on the Black Sea, recording the river’s sounds (at the surface and underwater), aquatic insects, and the various inhabitants of its banks. At 2880 km. (1785 miles) the Danube is Europe’s second-longest river and one of its most historically significant, having long been a trade and cultural conduit between east and west. Its drainage basin encompasses much of Central Europe and it has carved out deep gorges dividing the southern arm of the Carpathians from the Balkan Mountains. I recorded from the banks, finding a great variety of water sounds as the gradient and bank materials changed, often feeling that I was hearing the process of geological change in real-time. Towards the end of the final field trip, while listening to small waves slap into a rounded overhang the river had carved in a mud bank in Rasova, Romania (CD 3 track 2), I realised that the river has agency; it composes itself, shaping its sounds by the way it sculpts its banks. Along the way I spoke with people for whom the Danube is a central influence on their lives, an integral part of their identity, asking them “What does the river mean to you” Could you live without it?” They responded in their native languages and dialects, their voices woven into the river’s sounds, placed as close to the location where I met them as possible. “What is a river?” was the question underlying the whole project for me. Many people helped with every aspect of the project at every stage, and I am deeply grateful for their generosity and interest. The installation, “A Sound Map of the Danube”, was completed in 2005 and first presented during the Donau Festival in Krems, Austria. It was mixed in 5.1 surround sound with audio engineer Paul Geluso at Harvestworks Digital Media Arts in New York, and this version was re-mixed in stereo in 2008. Annea Lockwood
I think this is a really interesting concept and I find it fascinating listening to how much you can really take from the audio. I started thinking about how I could relate this to myself and I started thinking about the river Thames. I was considering doing a sound map of the river somehow? I want to do some research into it.