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Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music
Pierre Schaeffer’s In Search of a Concrete Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012) To put it bluntly, I have always been sceptical of Pierre Schaeffer’s status within sound culture. I...
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Questions of sound
I am currently writing an entry for the Oxford online art dictionary and I’m thinking about the allure of sound we have witnessed in the early years of the twenty first century. The current interest...
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Natural Recorded Nature
Today I’ve been trying to write about a problematic tendency, in field recording, toward the dissolution of the recording subject into the field. Daniela Cascella En Abime The art of the field...
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Hunting for Sound in Nature: Field Recording in Sound Art
Over the next few weeks I’ll be posting a series of blogs around some thoughts and ideas related to field recording in sound art. By field recordings I mean, recordings made on site and often in ‘the...
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Sound Studies [Hunting for Sound in Nature]
There is no doubt that sound in its numerous facets has been placed squarely on the scholarly table in the last twenty years. There has been a quantifiable and interdisciplinary turn towards sound,...
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(Sound)scapes: Hunting for Sound in Nature 3
“Today all sounds belong to the continuous field of possibilities lying within the comprehensive dominion of music. Behold the new orchestra: the sonic universe!” R. Murray Schafer Canadian composer R....
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Recording in the Field: Hunting for Sound in Nature 4
We can imagine the landscape painter setting out into the open air to paint a picture of the beautiful environment before her, or the photographer who ventures into far off environments to capture the...
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Nature as other: Hunting for Sound in Nature 5
0418h A rich chorus of resident species now; robins, song thrush and blackbirds with a lower backing of woodpigeons. 0420h cut for a passing military jet. 0424h The thrushes are joined by a chiffchaff...
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Futures from the Field: Hunting for Sound in Nature 6
Maybe just below the surface of the nature recording lies the possibility of a critical recording practice, one that doesn’t merely mimic, the scientific, nor the nature documentary, or believe in a...
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Conclusion #1: Hunting for Sound in Nature
Sound recordists enter their sites through a chain of events, methodologies and ideologies. Many of the beliefs about this process are expressed in terms of a well worn romanticism of nature and the...
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More soon!
It’s been a longer than I had hoped between posts. In part due to work committments, research travel and a bunch of conferences I’ve attended including Modern Soundscapes (UNSW, Sydney), TunedCity...
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Further Conclusions
This is the second conclusion to my mini-serial Hunting for Sound in Nature. Here I wish to address a theme of comments that I’ve noticed, namely the relationship of art to field recording. A comment...
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Did you hear that? It was art or What was that I can’t hear you over all the...
There has been a bit of chatter especially in experimental music circles around an article that appeared in the New York Times related to the show Soundings at MoMA (or should I say a lot of stamping...
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Noise in the Garden
Contemporary Art & The Noise of TENDING By Caleb Kelly & Ross Gibson It’s been a long time coming, but finally a paper I wrote with Ross Gibson has been published in the online journal...
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Sound Literacies
My blog has been a little neglected over the past few months – this doesn’t mean I haven’t been working on a number of projects, one of which is the subject of this post. I’m speaking at the Cultural...
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Wolf Notes
I have recently written a piece for Wolf Notes about representation. The piece asks questions regarding the strategies for the display of field recordings within the environment of the art museum or...
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La Monte Young’s empty but full gallery installations
Carrying out research for Gallery Sound on La Monte Young is an eye opener. I was surprised, if not shocked, with the lack of materials published on the composer. However we look at it Young has been...
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More research surprises: installation, sound art or music?
Last week I spent time looking at Alvin Lucier, for the same chapter as Young. The surprise takes the form of how many of the few words written about Lucier have been wrestling with his compositions as...
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European Spring
This year is turning into a very eventful one. At the centre of this will be three months in Berlin where I will be the Edgard Varèse Guest Professor at the TU Berlin – https://www.ak.tu-berlin.de/....
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Topsy-turvey historical continuums and mimetic fissures
In an editorial for a recent edition of Organised Sound, Salomé Voegelin and Thomas Gardner make a peculiar pronouncement that, “the current prominence of sound art has been aided by its relationship...
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