On the morning of the 2nd of February 2021 - a warm and humid summer day - I caught the light rail tram out to Arlington in Sydney’s inner western suburbs and walked up to Dulwich Hill to the apartment of musician and composer Laura Altman to talk with her about her busy creative life with experimental music. 

Laura is a clarinetist and improviser who joyfully explores all the sonic possibilities of that 17th century instrument and mainstay of classical orchestras and chamber ensembles. She is a long time active member of Sydney’s fabled Splinter Orchestra and a musical collaborator in duos and trios with fellow improvisers such as accordionist and pianist Monica Brooks, Berlin-based pianist of the prepared piano, Magda Mayas, guitarist Nick Brooks, saxophonist Peter Farrar, the late Cor Fuhler and many others. 

Laura also works to publish experimental music through the label Caterpillar, and is one of the organisers of the online information portal EMUS - exploratory music sydney - a calendar and newsletter for improvised, exploratory, experimental music and sound art in Sydney and surrounds - find that excellent resource at emus-dot-space

Various of Laura’s works are available on bandcamp and you can find out more at her website lauraaltman.net, and more about Sydney’s lively exploratory music and sound art scenes at emus-dot-space

tracklist
04:30-05:40 + 08:05-09:15  GW recording of a Splinter Orchestra performance at Articulate project space, Leichhardt, Sydney  30 July 2017
splinter orchestra bandcamp link
https://splitrec.bandcamp.com/album/mungo

10:30-15:30 Laura Altman & Monica Brooks, ‘concurrent II’ from ‘as is’, a limited edition CD and digital album released October 2012
https://itllbeawesome.bandcamp.com/album/as-is

17:20-28:30. Laura Altman & Nick Ashwood, ‘poltergeist’ from ‘Battery’
digital album released May 2020
https://caterpillarrec.bandcamp.com/album/battery

32:20-42:20 The Great Waitress (Laura Altman, Monica Brooks, Magda Mayas), ‘Sownder’ from ‘Flock’
limited edition CD and digital album released January 2014
https://greatwaitress.bandcamp.com/album/flock

13 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - guest - Laura Altman

This episode is a composition comprising field recordings I made in Kyoto Japan in 2015.

14 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Kyoto

In this episode I talk with Jeff Doring, an artist, musician, photographer, author, raconteur, conservationist and filmmaker.

In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Jeff spent time in Papua and New Guinea working as a Nagra-lugging sound recordist, firstly for a New York documentary production company. Shortly after, he returned as director and sound recordist in the making of his feature-length observational documentary ‘Tidikawa and Friends’. 

This award-winning project offered the world an uninterpreted filmic encounter with the ancient self-sufficient rainforest lifeworld of the biami or bedamini people, at a moment when colonial impact had only very recently reached them. The principal figure followed in the film is the charismatic seance-leader Tidikawa. 

A couple of years ago it was revealed that the original reel-to-reel magnetic tapes Jeff recorded for Tidikawa and Friends still existed.

This program presents just one of those dozens of 100-foot tapes, a field recording of an evening seance in Tidikawa's rainforest garden hut surrounded by village men and boys. Before the recording, Jeff reminisces about that night of 50 years ago, introduces the main people involved and explains some of the context of the project. Remarkably, the quality of this recently digitised tape is as good as the day it was recorded - a testament to the analogue marvel of mid-20th-century sound engineering. 

Now in his mid-70s, Jeff has lived off-grid in a bush hut and studio north-west of Sydney for the past four decades.  I spoke to him there, with generator evident in the background and surrounded by the calls of his beloved bush birds -  grey fantails’ squeaky trills, a wonga pigeon’s insistent monotone pulse, watery drifts of yellow-faced honeyeaters and many others…

You can find out more about Jeff, his films, photography and art practice at the podcast website sonicsketchbooks.net

17 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - guest - Jeff Doring

Artists make their work from anything available. One of the things I use is sound. This weeks program is a new suite of sonic constructs built from recordings of a few of my sonic-kinetic installations and objects. 

In 2015 I built 'the 21-pendulum entropophone', an instrument comprising a kinetic-acoustic array of discarded aluminium drink cans collected from Sydney streets, then worked to turn each into a kind of bell. 

The altered tins were suspended in series along seven long dowels, spaced to knock together when the dowels moved. Each dowel had three concrete weights attached, forming a long pendulum at each end and a short one in the middle. 

Each tins paper-thin aluminium membrane produced a low amplitude sound with a clean tone. Using various sizes and cutting to varying lengths created diverse random microtones.

Activated by visitors’ gentle touches, the instrument produced atonal clattering cascades, rhythmic pulses and ephemeral melodic sequences that gradually decayed to the silence of equilibrium. Thus the name - entropophone.

It is an instrument anyone can play, but the sounds it makes at any given moment are not repeatable.

Heard from nearby, the sounds are like distant moored boats or wandering farm animals. But if the listener brings their ears close to the hanging tins, the sound is suddenly experienced as surprisingly rich and resonant.

The exhibition also included my 3-pendulum harmonograph, a mechanical drawing machine that translates the slowly expended energy of pendulums into detailed geometric drawings.

I made various audio recordings of both works and have used excerpts to prepare a sequence of new sonic sketches for this program.

The episode concludes with a work-in-progress version of a score for voices. In 2019 I was co-curator and showed works in an exhibition that ended with a performance salon on November 30 - International Remembrance Day for Lost Species. For the event, I wrote a cross-species score for voices of humans and forest pigeons, with birdcalls and words derived from an online biologists’ field recording archive. To create an aid for rehearsals with the six-person performance ensemble Reject Theatre Troupe, I used text-to-voice software to develop the composition. This is what is presented here. The work is titled 'Skins in the Museum'.

18  SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - 21-pendulum entropophone + 3-pendulum harmonograph

release date: 11 may 2021

This weeks episode is from a two day sound and drawing workshop I developed and conducted in May 2021 with 3rd year BFA students at the National Art School in Sydney’s inner-city suburb of Darlinghurst. I’m a sessional tutor there, teaching two foundational streams with first year students - introduction to digital media, and experimental and expanded drawing. 

The workshop was in two parts - acoustic and electronic - both exploring the often neglected sonic and performative qualities and potentials of drawing, the representation of sound through drawing and various forms of the graphical score, and the diverse sonic textures and musicality of mark-making generated with different implements and media and recorded with different microphone types. 

On the first day we devised means of acoustic amplification of the act of drawing and performed improvised ensemble pieces in the tradition of Cornelius Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra. 

On the second day, we worked with digital audio recorders and mobile phones to record drawing actions using a variety of microphones, then simultaneously replayed the recordings through portable wifi speakers - one for each student - to create a Cageian sonic ensemble of chance encounter. 

I assembled this episode’s series of sketches from recordings we made during the workshop which was staged in a huge renovated 19th century sandstone prison cellblock now used as a teaching space. 

Thanks to all the students who participated and especially Lydia, Charlotte and Zane who provided their recordings for me to intermingle and cross-pollinate with my own for this episode. 

You can find out more about sonic sketchbooks through the episode guide at sonicskechbooks.net

19 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - sound + drawing workshop 2021

In April 2018 I was fortunate to have time at an artist in residency program in the musician’s cottage at Bundanon,  on Wodi Wodi and Yuin country, near Nowra on the south coast of New South Wales. Bundanon is a large property on the Shoalhaven River, part farmland, part bushland, which was the home and studio of Australian artist Arthur Boyd. He and his wife Yvonne gifted the property to the nation in 1993 as a cultural trust for the development of artists and arts education. The residency program is an important part of this continuing work. 

The musicians cottage is one of the old farm houses converted to include a music studio with grand piano and living quarters. I shared the residency with friend and artist colleague Barbara Campbell who was developing her own new work involving tree rubbings onto copper sheet. 

I spent the time constructing various of my aleatoric ensemble assemblages - analogue sonic-kinetic devices basded on small turntables fitted with boxes, tins and containers with marbles, superballs and other objects inside - and recording the unique chaotically looping musicality of various combinations. The grand piano offered an opportunity for some Cageian explorations of chance, mostly dropping superballs onto the inner harp of the grand piano and recording the stochastic results. 

A more structured project was recording many individual chords from the sheet music of Erik Satie. Sort of searching for the harmonic DNA of Satie’s perhaps too well-known and carelessly used music. 

Other strands of activity were making abstract drawings and watercolours during the day, and making field recordings around the property at any time of day or night.

For this episode of sonic sketchbooks I’ve created a series of new compositions from the recordings made during that 2018 residency. 



Bundanon supports new work, research and collaborations by artists and researchers from around the world. 

You can find links to the Bundanon Trust website and  find out more about the podcast at the sonic sketchbooks episode guide - sonicsketchbooks.net

21 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Bundanon Residency 2018

This episode is excerpts from field recordings I made in Japan in 2018. Travelling with three friends, we spent time in Kyoto, Higashi-Hiroshima and Uno, a coastal town providing access to the fabled art islands of the Seto inland sea. 

Most of this sonic montage is uninterrupted by explanation other than to introduce recordings made inside the remarkable Teshima Art Museum. 

All of us had long wanted to visit the inspiring cultural phenomenon of the Seto Art Islands. From Uno, we ventured to the islands of Teshima and Naoshima to experience the art projects and singular museums - particularly the stunning Teshima Art Museum, a huge concrete dome housing one art project, the creative vision of artist Rei Naito and architect Ryue Nishizawa. The building resembles a huge water drop and the installation inside activates water in subtle, slow and beautiful ways. 

The internal space is 60 by 40 meters with no supporting columns. The vast open space reaches only 4.3 meters height, gently rising from the circumference. The floor is polished concrete with barely noticeable shallow depressions scattered around.

Two large oval openings allow wind, light and sound into this unusual volume. Trickles of water continuously emerge from tiny openings in the ground plane, pooling in the slight yet broad depressions to create reflective surface. 

The unusual space causes extreme sonic illusions and reverberative feedback. It also acts as a sonic telescope, capturing and amplifying distant sounds. 

I visited the Teshima Museum twice. It was raining on the second day and I spent a couple of hours inside the structure watching passing showers fall through the oculus apertures in perfectly defined oval cascades. 

While visitors are asked to not take photos inside, the attendants had no issue with me making audio recordings. 

This episode concludes with excerpts from my recordings on that rainy day inside the Teshima Art Museum.

22 SONIC SKECHBOOKS - Japan 2018

This episode is a sail along some of the backwaters of lo-fi electronic and digital sound I’ve been experimenting with and exploring over the past few years. My first forays into electromagnetic and digital sonic synthesis were in the late 1970s early 80s on my Fender Rodes 88 piano, a first generation Casio VL-Tone bought by my old friend and fellow sonic explorer adam wolter aka philip toydog - he particulalrly enjoyed the cheesy drum machine presets of that little novelty keyboard calculator - now a collectors item -, followed by various Commodore Amiga computers, a Korg MS-10, numerous tape recorders and then until now the long march of macintosh computers and devices.  

The sounds in the multi-tracked composition you’re about to hear were generated using combinations of a handful of small independent devices, some out of kickstarter projects I’ve backed, some home-made, some from the many small scale labs springing up everywhere and some using iOS apps. 

I connect or bring devices together and work with them to try and find soundscape registers that interest me - usually slow, meandering musicalities incorporating stochastic and random generative elements, and unusual sonic combinations. I don’t categorise or classify this as music - its more a form of sonic sculpture shaped outside the formal constraints of BPM, tunings, instrument skills or conventional instruments. These are soundscapes for those, like me, with incurable sonic curiosity…

23 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - electronic explorations

This episode focuses on an acoustic sculptural object I devised and built in 2014. 

It’s a cryptic flattened cylinder that rests on a low stool. A pair of identical stools face each other across the object. Gallery visitors are invited to sit, in pairs, to hold and move the object in their hands.  

Sounds are generated within the object - rolling, bumping and random sequences of resonant metallic tones. The object is an instrument producing a musicality of uncertainty.

The mechanism is hidden within, prompting investigation by peering into slots around its perimeter. Like looking into a microscope there’s a scale transition from the space of the room to the shadowy micro-architectural world within, and a simple revelation of the sonic mechanism. Three table tennis balls roll freely around striking any of the dozens of individual steel tines mounted on hardwood blocks inside.  
The object’s form is intentionally reminiscent of the zoetrope, a 19th century pre-cinema optical device for creating animated visual effects. But rather than animation of vision, this object animates sound, relationships, association and memory.

I built the cryptic lamellaphone as an homage to the 19th century English ‘natural philosopher’ Robert Brown (1773-1858). In 1827, he observed a captivating phenomenon through his microscope which he carefully described but could not adequately explain. It was the apparently animated - that is, life driven - motion of pollen grains in water.  He published a paper - A Breif Account of Microscopical Observations made in the months of June, July and August 1827 on the particles contained in the pollen of plants and on the general existence of active molecules in organic and inorganic bodies.” 

Decades later in the early twentieth century, Australian physicist William Sutherland, Polish scientist Marian Smoluchowski and Albert Einstein independently theorised what Brown had seen - the random motion of minute particles in suspension - as evidence of molecular activity, informed by the rapidly developing new ideas in physics about ‘the atom’. On the movement of small particles suspended in a stationary liquid demanded by the molecular-kinetic theory of heat. The phenomenon is now known as Brownian motion.

So this episode comprises direct and manipulated recordings - made with different microphone types - of my ‘cryptic lamellaphone’ singing songs for Robert Brown.

26 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - cryptic lamellaphone

This sonic offering is built from recordings made with the Apple iOS app RodeRec from the Australian audio tech company Rode, makers of many excellent microphone types and other audio production gear. 

I started using the RodeRec app soon after it was released in 2013, loaded onto an iphone 4, and have always carried and used it on my iphones ever since. 

It’s promoted as a ‘field recording’ app and that’s how I’ve used it, to capture recordings of moments of acoustic interest encountered while out in the world. As we tend to carry our phones with us everywhere, the app has been a useful way to hold onto sounds when without my recorders and mics - which is, of course, much of the time. I tend to make shorter captures with the app - though not always - and the ubiquity of mobile phone presence out in the world means that no-one pays a 2nd glance to someone standing looking at their handheld gadget and wearing headphones. 

My assumption is that their assumption is I’m listening to music rather than recording a fellow throwing bottles into the back of truck or the sound of travelling on public transport.

So, this composition is comprised only of sounds captured using my iphone and RodeRec, and here there is no time smearing or much in the way of filters or effects, just some layering to create textural and narrative interest…

28 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - RodeRec sketches

I constructed this weeks episode during the third week of a stay-at-home, shelter-in-place COVID-19 lockdown on gadigal land, in sydney australia where I live, make and work. 

Without access to my studio and the majority of my archived sound library, I’ve structured this episode from field recordings I have on a home iMac, recordings made at the rural artist-in-residence facility at Bundanon on the central south coast of New South Wales. 

The spine of the piece, a loud fluttering, is a time-stretched recording of hundreds of flies and other insects swarming on a recently dead wombat. Out bushwalking in pathless forest, I heard the loud sonic epicentre of insects advantaging the carcass long before I could see it. 

I set up my recorder to capture a 20 minute document of the event. That recording has been slowed to 10 times the original length, to make strange and hear anew that encounter. Low musical and wailing sounds are slowed forest birds, a crystalline drone slowed cicadas and wind.

This bed track is interwoven with recordings of my walking through different environments at Bundanon - domestic, rural agricultural and remnant bushland - and of fire, water, wind and small sonic events made with found objects. 

The intention is to create a strangely evocative soundscape, something to listen to and wonder about while drawing, napping or in other ways spending time in lockdown… 

You can find out more about the podcast in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

29 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - lockdown

release date: 10 august 2021 - Australian census day 

Well into the second month of another COVID-19 lockdown here in Sydney, with high daily infection rates indicating no end in sight for a while…

This weeks episode presents the soundtracks to a collective series of abstract digital video sequences titled Colourforms that I made in 2017 for a gallery exhibition.

Anyone who has seen my Instagram posts during this lockdown will be familiar with my ‘digital dusk’ series of one minute visual abstracts. The origin of the technical methodology I use to make them might begin with the Colourform series, but the aesthetic was certainly in play a lot earlier, in the 1970s, when I’d draw directly on Super 8 and 16mm celluloid film with overheard projection pens and make 35mm slides using cellophane, packaging and any other translucent materials that could be cutup and glued together on that tiny work area.

Today I construct and film simple kinetic assemblages with my iPhone, bring the scenes into Final Cut Pro and manipulate exposure, saturation, filters, time, and layers blending to explore abstract visual potentials, completely disassociating the filmed scenes from any semblance of real world recognition to place them squarely within the context and historical traditions of abstract art.

The six tracks of this podcast episode were constructed in a similar way, developing abstraction from both the captured vision and its accompanying sound. Each track is introduced by its original title, ably though awkwardly spoken by a digital assistant.

32 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - colourforms

release date: 14 september 2021 
I've been collecting more Electromagnetic Frequencies or EMF from the local environment - this time scavenging sounds from various sources in the small apartment I live in. 

Every electronic device, source or connection will generate some form of EMF, which remains mostly inaudible to the naked ear though sometimes you might hear a hum or a buzzing. There’s a kind of electrosonic diversity to these found sounds - there’s an anima there, a life-likeness; the EMF flutters, whistles, tones and crackling like the cryptic calls and cries of insects, birds and animals in an environment.

This time I’ve used a different EMF detector, one built by Sorte Muld Instruments, a project of Martin Kofoed a visual artist and illustrator living in Amsterdam. Sorte Muld, meaning perhaps black soil or black mold, is an important Danish archaeological site of an iron age-early viking settlement that was populated for a millenium into the common era. 

Significant finds there include hundreds of tiny stamped gold foil squares of diverse figurative symbolism. No-one really knows what the funtion or use-value of these tiny gold squares was - somewhat like my sonic sketchbooks podcast...

This composition is another sonic derivé, drifting the listener across and through curious scene-settings for an audio theatre of the mind, built with fragments of recordings made in the past few days of this third month of a COVID lockdown here in Sydney Australia.

You can find out more about the Sorte Muld EMF detector and explore the podcast series in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

37 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Sorte Muld EMF

release date - 28 september 2021

This week’s composition is titled ‘To Higher Ground’. I constructed it over the past week, returning to strategies of using spoken word appropriated from diverse sources that I began with in the 1970’s when I’d cassette record voices from broadcast television and shortwave radio to use in cutups for performances, installations and super 8 film soundtracks. The tools have changed but the strategy remains one I continue to explore and experiment with. 

The semantic demand of the spoken word activates only for those languages we, as individuals, can comprehend. For those we do not, the rhythms, cadences and inferences of heard disembodied  language carry cultural and humanist emotional references that vary depending on our prior interests, exposures, curiosities, capacity for empathy and so on.

In ’To Higher Ground’, fields of sound created with tools like the MakeNoise Morphagene, EMF detectors, and apps such as RadioGarden and Natural Readers, are combined with my field recordings to form aural spaces populated with borrowed de-contextualised words, phrases and statements from various recognisable and anonymous speakers. 

Sonic Sketchbooks is an art project of slow listening and poetic intent, offered to our ‘interesting’ times of incoherent abundance, accelerated attentions and generalised anxieties.

39 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - To Higher Ground

This week’s episode continues my ongoing investigations of the sonic potentials of the MakeNoise Morphagene modular synthesis module, previously featured in episodes 41 and 44.  

This new composition incorporates Morphagene-ic manipulations of original captured sounds made with some of my one-off studio-built sound art instruments, occasionally punctuated with unprocessed field recordings made around inner city Sydney. 

I’m interested in exploring the suggestive spaces and ways in which perceptual processing of unfamiliar sonic information - sounds for which its difficult to attach a known source, such as the frequently unpredictable sonic artifice generated by the Morphagene -  is challenged or disrupted when familiar real world sounds in the form of field recordings bubble through their cryptic sonic fabric. 

You can explore the podcast series in the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

46 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS

release date: 28 december 2021
 This is the final episode of the Sonic Sketchbooks podcast for 2021. There will be an indeterminate hiatus before starting up again. If you stay subscribed, the next episode should appear for you sometime in February 2022. 

For this past year of 2021, I’ve been getting together with two friends and artist colleagues - Michael Thomas Hill and Ross Rudesch Harley - to make sounds with our various synthesisers, music softwares, mics and a couple of ‘normal’ instruments. In the tradition of such things, much time was spent coming up with a collective name - together we are CHORDATA. This episode is the debut airing of a few of the Chordata sonic constructions. 

At the beginning of the year, here in Sydney Australia - Gadigal land of the Eora nation - we’d get together weekly in Ross’s home studio to wrestle with multiple devices, too many cables and adaptors, an antiquated mix desk, analogue/digital signal translations, over-complicated softwares and our differing musical preferences, to create freeform soundscapes that perhaps only a parent could love. Gradually each of us succumbed to the allure of modular synthesis, buying into different devices and systems that suit our varying temperaments and sonic preferences.

During the three-month-plus mid-year COVID-19 stay-at-home lockdown we devised a methodology to continue the investigative pleasures of our weekly sonic get togethers, without actually getting together. 

Using a shared online folder, each of us prepared bed tracks of four minutes duration and nominated one of the other three to add a second layer which would be forwarded to the third Chordata member for addition of a final layer. Along with the time limit, another rule was titles of a single four letter word. 

Over he lockdown, we generated over 40 of these sound sketches from which I’ve selected just five for this episode - kelp, musk, poly, board, and tint - preceded by an earlier live recording we titled ’No.1 in Norway’.

52 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Chordata

release date: 05 july 2022

Of late I’ve been reading about 1816, the Year Without A Summer, a global experience of sudden disruption to normative climate cycles. 

In 1815 Mount Tambora, a volcano in present-day Indonesia, erupted - violently - blasting millions of tons of gases and tephra into the upper atmosphere.

These volcanic aerosols distributed up there, encircling the earth, reflecting light and heat from the sun to such an extent that in 1816 crops failed across entire continents, waterways used for trade remained frozen after winter and ‘unseasonal’ storms caused widespread flooding and havoc. These impacts resulted in epic famines, social upheaval, refugee diasporas and general disquiet.

Artist such as Kaspar David Friedrich in continental Europe and JMW Turner in the British Isles recorded the resulting, persistent phantasmagoric atmospheric effects of deep red skies and darkened days in their paintings, with great visual acuity.

But no-one then made a connection between the southern hemisphere eruption and its global consequences. This correlation didn’t happen until the early 20th century after the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa and other major volcanic events that effected global climate. 

Famously, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley and 19 years old Mary Shelley nee Godwin/Wollstonecraft decamped from England to Switzerland, where very cold, wet conditions persisted from winter into the European summer. Mary penned the story that would become Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus and Byron penned Darkness, an 82 line apocalyptic vision of the end of days in the cosmological extinguishment of all light.

Byron wrote Darkness when artificial lighting was produced directly by combustion of oils, wood, waxes or other fuels. In his poem humans burn everything in the world to produce light, to be able to see each other ‘once more’. The ubiquitous electric light we take for granted was yet to be invented. In 1780 husband and wife Luigi and Lucia Galvani discovered that static electricity could excite the nerves of dead frogs, Alessandro Volta invented the electric battery in 1799, and English inventor Francis Ronalds demonstrated the first electric telegraph for message transmission in 1816 - the Year Without A Summer. Our current deep reliance on electricity and its generation by combustion of fossil fuels and more recently nuclear fission, was well and truly seeded. 

So I got to thinking about humanity and The Industrial as a kind of slow distributed volcano - another force of nature spewing millions of tons of gases and particulates into the atmosphere that sustains us, regardless of potential consequences. Today, many point to the narrative of 1816 as an object lesson in appreciating the great ecological systems of our planet and how the earths climate can be impacted by disturbing the fine balance of billions of years of entropic settling. 

This episode arises from a re-reading of Byron’s poem Darkness, and looking at other poets’ interpretations of the dark, leap-frogging forward to poet Robert Lax in 1984 by way of Henry David Thoreau, Emily Dickinson, Yosano Akiko, Sylvia Plath and Gary Snyder.

65 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - darkness

This episode is a composition titled ‘I couldn’t find any trees…’

As is often the case, I sat down at my iMac to build it from recordings I’ve made since release of the previous episode. Yesterday, I walked to a relatively remote ocean beach south of Sydney with my partner, one of my sisters, her husband and their two adult daughters, celebrating one of their birthdays.

As people have always done on shell grit beaches, we chatted and combed through the crunchy underfoot fragments in search of tiny treasures of form, texture, pattern and colour. 

One of my nieces focused on collecting from the millions of tide-tumbled shards a handful of sea urchin spines, all a deep maroon-violet-blue. As her gather developed, she commented on the beautiful micro-acoustic glass-like sounds the tiny rods made as they knocked against each other in her palm. 

So, I recorded that tiny sound and use it here as the field for the following sonic sketch - it’s the tumbling tinkling tones randomly rolling under the first ten minutes.  

Other sounds encountered in this meander from forest to street via beach, classrooms and non-existent virtual spaces are:

water dripping in a sandstone cave in a recently flooded forest, 

a student drawing with contact mic attached to a pen and the signal diverted through a delay pedal,

a small rubber ball being rolled around inside an old square biscuit tin,

the rhythm of an ad hoc drawing machine in one of my experimental drawing classes,

some noodlings with miniature keyboardless synthesisers,

and, from the weekday streets of Redfern on Gadigal country, labourers taking down scaffolding 15-storeys up one of the many residential tower blocks being built like so many artificial cliffs and mountains on this age old hill top.

68 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - I couldn't find any trees

release date: 13 september 2022

A small mustard tin from India, a paulownia box for a teabowl from japan, a dried starfish, limpet shells, a whirlygig made from a beer can, vehicle flattened bottle caps collected from the streets, a steel street sweeper bristle aquiver on the edge of a wooden desk, tiny seashells in a ceramic bowl and that paulownia box, the spiky woody seedpod of the tree Flindersia australis, or Crow’s Ash, a soft-bristled shoe brush made and bought in Kyoto, offcuts of superthin aluminium dropped onto a marble benchtop, a field recording made on a warm afternoon in a forest on bidjigal country north-west of Sydney where I live on the pacific coast of Australia. 

Collected recently with a few different mics and recorders, these are the sonic materials I used to shape this episode through processes of layering, filtering, time-smearing, teasing, distorting, fragmenting, listening close, re-arranging and listening again. and again.

The resulting composition  ‘adrift, afloat, a wandering…’ I offer to the genie of your aural curiosity.

You can find out more about the podcast at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

70 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - adrift

release date: 20 december 2022

This new composition is a structuring of recent audio recordings made on national park field trips using hydrophones, contact mics and my trusty Tascam digital recorders mingled with home-studio noodlings with modular synthesisers, home-made instruments and iPad apps. 

At play in this sonified space of cinematic suggestion, sounds of sub-aquatic arthropods segue with unpredictable meanderings of the SOMA Cosmos ‘drifting memory station’ as it floats samples of a music box transcription I made of melodic phrases from John Cage’s 1948 ‘In A Landscape’; a thunderstorm catches a Thai family off-guard in the street; a small rotating sculpture knocks persistently at the edges of the sound field while, on a moonless night, frogs and crickets sing the cool night air as the farm’s labourers slumber…

I hope you find this new sonic assemblage of imaginative interest.

You can find out more about the sonic sketchbooks podcast series at the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net. This is episode 71.

71 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - in a soundscape

release date: 27 december 2022

COVID has left me a nagging discomfort, an occasional slight distress of being breathless. 

‘Breathless’ is the English-language title for Jean-Luc Godard’s breathtaking 1960 cinematic experiment ‘A Bout de Souffle’ with its charismatic stars  Jean Sieberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, mid-20th century Paris and Godard’s slap-in-the-face stylistics.

He called his many films postcards and insisted they had no greater meaning than the direct experience of seeing and hearing them and whatever that might provoke within each person and amongst and between them collectively, afterwards.

Not long ago I chanced upon, or an algorithm offered to me, a video interview with Godard made not long before he left this mortal coil in September 2022. His voice was breathless, evaporating before my ears - not surprising as he sat in a doorway joyfully smoking a cigar worthy of Castro. He was speaking his native language, French, in a feature-film length interview with the unseen interlocutor a strident confident young male voice born long after 'A Bout de Souffle' had receded into cinematic legend. I could understand none of what was being said but Godard’s defiant nonagenarian mannerisms and the cadence and carefree struggle of his speech mesmerised me.

A year ago I stood on the shore of an east coast national park embayment, slightly before dawn, holding one of my digital recorders to capture the rhythmic sounds of small waves breaking on sand, the stridulations of unseen crickets secreted among dew-speckled dune grasses and the songs of awakening avian life in the rainforest pocket behind me. The situation was cold, dark, and under headphones made transcendent.

There’s an iPad app I have, downloaded from the John Cage dot org website, that presents a randomiseable grid of samples of prepared piano that can be played by touching the cold glass surface of that chimerical device, a curious kind of puppetry. 

We are fortunate to live in the remaining time of birds, the time just before many of their immaculate voices will be sequentially swallowed into the maelstrom of extinction stirred up by our billions of human desires and fears.

Listen to the birds, they have nothing intelligible to say…

Wherever, whenever and whoever you are, thank-you for listening. If you’d like to find out more about the sonic sketchbooks podcast series, you can go to the episode guide at sonicsketchbooks.net

72 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - breathless

release date: 24 january 2023

This new composition drifts across and through various sonic topologies of layered and abstracted recordings including :

water boiling in an old-fashioned whistle kettle, 

passenger and freight jets descending over inner-city suburbs, 

multi-story scaffolding being removed from a newly completed residential tower nearby, 

the usually inaudible signals and patterns of elecromagnetic frequencies constantly emitting from devices all around us, 

morphagenic distortions of my spatial pleximetry recordings where I capture the singular sound of objects being struck once, 

and the rhythmic pulse of the bulbous bright green cicada Cystosoma saundersii, commonly called the bladder cicada that I encountered in the suburbs of Brisbane Queensland during a 2022 summer family visit. These cicadas, unusually, are nocturnally active and begin their calling in the crepuscular half-light near dusk and call long into night’s darkness. 

Like the songs of crickets, songs of cicadas - different for every one of the over 3000 scientifically identified species - form an important part of locally specific soundscapes around the world. Cicadas have a high incidence of species endemism - wherein a species is habitat dependent, and a particular habitat may not have a wide or contiguous distribution - so there are all over the temperate and tropical world, local cicada songs that contribute to a sonic identity of place. 

I treasure my field recordings of summer in Japan for the highly evocative sounds of cicada species very different to those I know from the various parts of Australia where I’ve lived and worked over the decades. I had known those Japanese cicadas long before hearing them actually call from their tree podiums, through the cinema of Ozu, Kurosawa, where the musical pulse of cicadas underscores the langour of the archipelago’s hot, humid summers.    

As ever, I imagine my compositions as a kind of transport for the listener to journey into unusual but hopefully evocative sonic territories of mind, memory and feeling.

——-

You can find out more about the podcast series at the episode guide at sonicsktechbooks.net.

73 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - cicada song

I’ve long been collecting individual sounds of everyday objects like saucepan lids, wine glasses, tools and implements, vessels and containers. I strike the object once with something, perhaps a chopstick with a rubber band wound around one end, a wooden spoon or something else to hand, and record the sound it makes. Of course, any object can be coaxed to generate a variety of sounds depending on what it is struck with, where and with what intensity. 

I call this my Pleximetry series, named for the medical diagnostic method of tapping the chest and other body areas. Forms of this art of listening-touch were practiced in Egyptian antiquity and probably across pre-colonial societies, but an early written description of the technique was made, in Latin, in 1761 by a doctor who developed his method from memories of his father tapping wine kegs. In 1826 a doctor of the Napoleonic wars, Adolph Piorry inspired by the recent invention of the stethoscope to listen to and learn from the bodies internal sonic mysteries, invented the pleximeter to instrumentalise diagnostic percussion with analogue amplification. He also coined other still-used neologisms such as toxin and septiceamia.

I’ve now gathered a library of hundreds of Pleximetries and have used them in different ways in gallery installations, performances and previous episodes; and I recently made an addition of 160 new sounds gathered from objects at a friends rural farmhouse and working sheds. 

This episode is a 20 minute ambient meditative composition made with a small subset of this new collection which I fed into a modular synthesis array. The audio files were first sent to a MakeNoise Morphagene granular synthesis module. The Control Voltage output of that input signal I cabled to a Mutable Instruments Branches module - a coin-toss simulator that randomly assigns signal to a pair of heads/tails outputs that were then sent to TipTop Audio’s MISO module - an acronym for Mix, Invert, Scale and Offset - for dial manipulation of the aleatory CV signals which are then fed back into the Morphagene to control various of its parameters such as sample selection, playback position within the sample, grain size and varispeed. The patched array is a feedback loop that continuously evolves without further intervention. 

I like to think of this as a kind of prepared synthesiser, in the trailing wake of John Cage’s prepared piano and all the other prepared instruments and players that have followed from his 1940 experiments to make something new, strange and complex through inventive, exploratory combination of knowns, unknowns and the vagaries of chance.

I then further manipulated the Morphagene output recordings through my usual compositional methods of layering, time-shifting, effecting and signal-processing in the digital video editing software Final Cut Pro.

74 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - pleximetries

This composition is built from various new recordings of encounters with insects and birds, and wind-song heard through a gap in the wall of a remote rural building, wound together with outputs from various synthesisers - modular and otherwise -, a temporary sonic-kinetic sculpture made from tins and containers, and recordings of analogue, generated sounds I find interesting such as a quartz pebble bounced around on the steel tray of an old dustpan, and tapping a collection of antique porcelain plates displayed on a weatherboard farmhouse wall. 

With many of the small digital audio generators I’ve bought over the past few years, it’s close to impossible to replicate sounds because once the device is switched off, many or all of the internal settings of the session are negated, lost, wiped. On power-up, the electronics are refreshed and each new combination of dial settings, cables, inputs to outputs and so on creates a new sonic field unique to the moment of its generation. I quite like this - probably unintentional - surrender of control - it ensures a degree of non-attachment and might be interpreted as a respect for the moment of making, for the valuing of process over product. 

As ever, this new composition is offered for listening with full, wavering or minimal attention - intended as a contribution - strange and unusual - to the ambient sensory environment of your studio, home, travel or workspace and as food, fuel or grit in the oyster of your creative inner life.

75 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS

John Cage - composer, artist, writer, provocateur, citizen mycologist and much more - was born 111 years ago on the 5th of September 1912. I’m publishing this 2023 episode on his birthdate, and the composition is made in homage to him and the inspiration I’ve found in his work and ideas since the late 1970s. There is much to discover about his life and works on the vast repositories of the internet, so you can perhaps bounce around there for a bit while listening…

If you’re up for a little old-fashioned book-reading, an excellent biography titled Where the Heart Beats was written by Kay Larson and first published by The Penguin Press in 2012.

Later this week I’m opening a solo show of drawing works at DRAW Space, a new gallery here in Gadigal/Sydney. One of the works is titled ‘Sound drawing for DRAW Space and John Cage’. It’s constructed from reworked post-consumer packaging, primarily plastic, cardboard and aluminium, formed into channels, tunnels, chutes and drops arranged in site-specific marble-run slaloms on the gallery walls. 

A visitor climbs a platform ladder to drop quandong* nuts into the tops of the slaloms. These natural wooden marbles sequentially sonify the various materials as they roll, zig-zag, drop and bounce along their gravity-assisted journey to terminal receptacles on the gallery floor. 

Both visual score and sounding instrument, each slalom is an analogue sound sequencer creating a replicable noise-melody and while repetitive of the same sequence, each tumbling quandong ‘run’ varies depending on initial conditions and the momentary physics of material encounters along the way.

While not alone in exploring the creative potentials of chance operations and actively addressing questions about how to think about sound and what music might be, John Cage was uncannily prolific, and his influence across art forms wide-ranging. This episode is a new composition built from preliminary recordings of tests for the work I’ll be installing later in the week, entwined with various other sonic explorations of the past few months and years.

With thanks to Barbara Campbell for performing the piano chords derived from the music of Erik Satie.

76 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - JOHN CAGE 111

I built this new composition ‘polytonal wander’ from five recent recordings using different methods and devices for each.   F

irstly, a new modular element in my small Eurorack mix is an ERM Polygogo polygonal synthesis generator which allows very interesting signal creation using multiple control voltages applied to eight different parameters. For this recording I patched randomised CV in from a couple of BASTL Kastle instruments.   

Secondly, I used my MakeNoise Morphagene to generate manipulations of various field recordings and thirdly collected new EMF recordings with my trusty SOMA Ether roaming over a collection of electronics comms and security boxes that have gradually accumulated on a mundane wall in a staff kitchenette at the school where I teach experimental drawing.   

A fourth sequence was generated with very low frequency waveforms output from a Mordax Data unit that allows fine grain control of shapes, hertz and overlay modulation of pairs of waveforms.   

Finally, fifthly, for a deep analogue element I tied a pair of small kalimbas together, one facing up one facing down, so I could play them simultaneously held in both hands. Each has five steel tines but one, made in Germany, is very sweetly chromatically tuned and the other, made in north Africa is, let’s say, intuitively tuned and has buzzing rings of tin fitted onto each tine which is a traditional and sonically important element of many African instruments. I used one of my Tascam recorders to capture an impromptu performance in the bathroom with this ad hoc assembly.  

As ever, this composition, constructed over a couple of days from the five original tracks, is offered as an experimental divertissement, a strange, hopefully intriguing gift of sculpted sound, something to accompany your creative making or as a transport into unknown imaginaries.

77 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - polytonal wander

Over decades of field recording, I’ve grown to increasingly appreciate and utilise incidental sounds made between or around an intended sound capture. For example, walking across the dried-out forbs and grasses of a drought-effected wetland to follow a large flock of tiny red-browed finches moving on wing in clouds of synchronous sparkle between patches of seeding grasses on the edge of a forested hill on a warm morning in early summer. 

[ Pushing against an impulse ingrained during analogue times when cassette tape capture time limits demanded economy, I often keep the recorder running while relocating or resetting.]

This episode presents a pair of new sonic sketches connected by that sound of walking. Each sketch incorporates a machine rhythm constant—one a drawing machine, the other an experimental instrument I built on a small modified turntable in which ping-pong balls roll in an octagonal box and bounce off symmetrically fixed aluminium barriers. 

Surrounding these slow core flows, electronic and digital waveforms drone and drift, twist and twine, crackle and decay. 

Music to my ears and perhaps to yours also…

78 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - two sketches

Around midnight of the 14th of December 2023 the Sun emitted an unusually strong solar flare - an unimaginably vast and powerful eruption of primary cosmic energy. The event was observed and monitored by terrestrial, atmospheric and space-wandering instruments of various government and scientific agencies of we, the humans. And with a welter of extraordinary imagery and catastrophic predictions, was reported widely in global media.

This significant space weather event occurred while I was developing this episode in response to a prompt by longtime listener Philip Toydog to ‘do something with UTC’ - Coordinated Universal TIme - and more specifically the sonic experience of UTC familiar to many who have dabbled in listening to Short Wave or High Frequency radio transmissions. 

As a boy had a germanium crystal radio - a Japanese made SR-150 Science Egg Radio. The Egg in the title described its shape - a clear plastic egg containing a tangle of wires and a giant diode. It required no power - an alligator clip attached to anything metal (my bed frame) that would act as an aerial and a decidedly hospital-like mono earpiece was used to listen discreetly. Tuning was by winding a thin steel columnar screw up or down to locate AM signals. I did enjoy finding the ABC and listening to music programs, but I also enjoyed the spaces between, the ever varying static. A couple of decades later I bought a Sony World Radio with shortwave capability and explored the incredible ephemeral sounds of short wave transmissions coming from who-knew-where bouncing from the ionosphere.

One of these was Coordinated Universal Time - a hypnotic crackle-and-fade 60 beats per minute pulsation periodically defined by two American-accented voices - a woman and a man - announcing, once a minute, the Universal Time moment about to be traversed. You can read about UTC in the usual places. 

Thinking back on my 80s and 90s interest in short wave radio, the enigmatic world of Number Stations came to mind, which in turn prompted a reminiscence of seeing Jean Cocteau’s 1950 film Orphee, at a tiny theatrette in a federal government building in Brisbane where cinemateque films borrowed from the National Library were screened maybe only once a month, on a Thursday night to an audience of maybe 20 subterranean cinephiles. 

One aspect of that film that fascinated me is the use of a car radio as a site where the titular angry self-obsessed poet listens to and transcribes surrealistic sentences declaimed (in French of course) by a resonant deep male voice, plagiarising transmissions perhaps emanating from the underworld of the dead. Jean Cocteau confirmed that this oracular radio was inspired by BBC radio broadcasts he heard during the Nazi occupation of France – mysterious apparent nonsense of numerals, words and musical fragments carrying coded messages from the British military to French resistance fighters during WW2. Prototypical examples of what would come to be known as Numbers Stations - tools of trade of state-based secret service organisations.

There’s much more of course, but save to say this new composition crowds various of these inspirations together with my modular musings into a drifting enigmatic roll on the plasma sands of the ionospheric beach gazing into the stellar maw of our solar system as it coughs a chaotic bolus of x-rays and plasma our way. 

Gary Warner, 2023
Host/Composer, Sonic Sketchbooks podcast

79 Sonic Sketchbooks - UTC

79 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - UTC

Episode description
This first episode of the Sonic Sketchbooks podcast is a rhizomatic composition of excerpts from upcoming episodes, an introduction to some of the types and uses of sound explored in the podcast series. The following playlist includes notes about the sequence of sounds, and the episode from which each is derived. More information about each episode will become available at the time of the episode’s release.

Playlist for Sonic Sketchbooks Episode 01
timings rounded to closest 5 second interval; compositions, artworks and field recordings by Gary Warner unless otherwise noted

01:25 - 02:35 		
field recording of A Quivering Marginalia, an installation by Gary Warner and Jon McCormack at the University of Sydney College of the Arts Gallery, 07-30 July 2016 - Ep 10 

02:30 - 03:05		
interview with Professor Jon McCormack, Zoom, 07 July 2020 - Ep 04

03:05 - 03:55		
soundtrack to Eden, a digital interactive installation by Jon McCormack - Ep 04

03:50 - 05:10		
exhibition soundtrack for An Ecology of Aleatoric Drawings, Stacks projects,  2018 -  Ep 07

05:00 - 06:50		
field recording of frog pond at Ryoan-ji, Kyoto Japan, 16 May 2017 - Ep 13

06:50- 07:05		
Clocks and Clouds performing, Newtown, Sydney, 20 July 2019 - Ep 09

07:05 - 08:20		
Untitled Intuitions, a sound art composition - Ep 06

07:55 - 09:50		
field recording at Origma Reserve, warm, overcast, still, 4pm 24 November 2019 - Ep 12

09:45 - 11:00		
05 July 2020 - Jeff Doring narrating while listening to audio he recorded in 1971 at Obeimi, New Guinea - Ep 14

11:00 - 13:05		
Nagra field recording ‘Biami Music 30’ by Jeff Doring, Obeimi, New Guinea, 1971 - Ep 14

13:00 - 14:45		
exhibition soundtrack for The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors, AGNSW 2010 - a collaboration with Ian Hamilton - Ep 03

14:40 - 16:05		
field recording - Keihan Line subway approaching Demachi-Yanagi station, Kyoto, 2015 - Ep 13

16:00 - 16:30		
Clocks & Clouds performing at the Ort Festival, SNO Contemporary Art Projects, Marrickville, Sydney, 05 May 2017 - Ep 09

16:25 - 17:25		
exhibition soundtrack for An Ecology of Aleatoric Drawings, Stacks projects 2018 - Ep 07 

17:25 - 18:35		
recorded rehearsal for performance at Servo, Port Kembla, 24 August 2018  - Ep 08

18:30 - 19:45		
Soundtracker, installed in the Single Man’s Hut, Bundanon, 9 April – 7 May 2017 - Ep 11

19:45 - 21:20		
interview with Clocks & Clouds: Kraig Grady and Terumi Narushima, Unanderra, 05 November 2020 - Ep 09

21:10 - 23:00		
Clocks and Clouds performing at the International Memorial Day for Lost 	Species salon event at Articulate project space, 30 November 2019 - Ep 09

22:40 - 25:55		
exhibition soundtrack for The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors, AGNSW 2010 - a collaboration with Ian Hamilton - Ep 03

25:45 - 27:30		
Soundtracker, installed at ES74 Gallery, Alexandria, 17 November 2016 - Ep 11

27:10 - 29:20		
field recording of water running in a hillside gutter at Jakko-in, Ohara, Japan, 28 July 2015 -  Ep 13

28:00 - 29:20		
Barbara Campbell playing Dream by John Cage, Camperdown, Sydney, 09 February 2015 - Ep 05

01 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Episode 01

I’ve been experimenting with sound derived from everyday things for decades. In 1981 friends gave me John Cage’s book Empty Words because of my predilection for musicality over music. Musicality arising from the use of non-instruments and coalescences of chance, autonomy, simplicity, chaotic systems and bpm-less open-endedness.

My ‘aleatoric ensemble’ continues this fascination. It comprises a growing number of similar units, based on a small USB turntable modified to allow variable rotation speed. Combinations of trays, boxes and tins with balls, quandong nuts, marbles and other small objects inside are assembled in ad-hoc fashion on each turntable. 

Set in motion, the constructions turn, the objects move, balls roll, and surfaces are struck, generating a strangely captivating, repetitive but always slightly variant musicality. They’re a type of crude analogue sequencer varied by rotational speed and selection of objects.

Multiple turntables with various combinations of prepared objects are set in motion simultaneously to create complex soundscapes. Each instrument/device can be played by slight variations in RPM and addition or subtraction of different objects.

Ideally, the ensemble is used in performance and installation contexts because I want the audience to experience the sounds made by the system in real space and time, preferably over an extended duration. But I also make many compositions using my recordings of different aleatoric ensemble combinations.

aleatoric particles
‘aleatoric particles’ is a suite of 45 compositions, each of two minutes duration, created for a public art soundscape commissioned by Adelaide City Council, South Australia. Primary recordings made using the aleatoric ensemble were manipulated and mixed with excerpts from my field recordings to produce this unique collection of experimental sonic sketches. 

Seven examples are included here in the podcast, introduced by an incorporeal voice.

Episode 02 track list
timings rounded to closest 5 second interval

01:30 - 04:05
excerpt from ‘The Bundanon Sonographies’, 2018-2020

04:55 - 14:15
recorded rehearsal for performance ‘an aleatoric ensemble [+ other sonic miscellany]’, Articulate project space, Sydney, 12 November 2017

14:55 - 15:45
soundtrack element for performance ‘Scientarctica’, That Space, Brisbane, September 1986

17:10 - 32:15
seven of the ‘aleatoric particles’ series, 2017

END

02 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - The Aleatoric Ensemble

release date: 26 January 2021 
Guest Episode - Jon McCormack ‘Eden’  This week's program is the first of two episodes with digital media artist, musician, programmer and Director of the innovative Sensilab project at Melbournes Monash University, Professor Jon McCormack.   Jon and I have been colleagues, collaborators and friends since the mid 1980s. He has a remarkable oeuvre of work, more well known and acknowledged internationally than here in Australia. Before the advent of COVID19, he was always on his way to or from somewhere in the world to install his works, present papers and lectures or undertake an artist-in-residency project.  This episode is a conversation about his digital media installation project Eden. In a second episode we discuss his digital music software Nodal.

04 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Jon McCormack 01: Eden

Xi'an, Shaanxi province, China, is the site of ongoing work of archaeology, conservation and exhibition of the extraordinary relics of first emperor Qin Shihuang (259–210 BCE). This episode presents excerpts from a soundscape I developed for "The First Emperor - China's Entombed Warriors", a significant exhibition staged in 2010 at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia.   Then-director Edmund Capon invited me to develop and create the exhibition's multimedia elements. In addition to video projections and screens, we envisaged an atmospheric soundscape for the main exhibition hall where the two-thousand-year-old life-size terracotta warrior figures were to be displayed.  The soundscape uses two distinct types of sound - ambient compositions by artist and musician Ian Hamilton who I invited to collaborate on the project, and short, suggestive field recordings I made from source material provided by a China-based cinematographer.   These two sets of stereo tracks played simultaneously and unsynchronised from four speakers high in the corners of the two-storey space, ensuring always unpredictable combinations of music and field recordings.  Ian developed his contributions from recordings of traditional Chinese instruments, ancient bronze bells, and a Taoist ceremony in a remote mountain village.  He manipulated and transformed these found sounds to shape slowly evolving musical sequences, alternating quieter openness and louder complexity. And his sounds move spatially through the stereo field, drifting around the listener.  To accompany and complement Ian's music, I prepared excerpts from field recordings representing the elemental forces of fire, water, air and earth - rustling bamboo, forests at night, wind over sand, rainfall, insects and native birds.   In combination, the sounds provide a subtle cinematic register to the listening and viewing experience.   The original soundscape tracks were close to an hour's duration. The episode’s 20-minute example includes two of Ian's ambient tracks in full, accompanied by a randomised selection of my field atmospheres.  In late 2018, the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa in Wellington, commissioned me to create new large scale video projections for the entrance to their exhibition Terracotta Warriors: Guardians of Immortality. And our multi-speaker soundscape was again used in the main exhibition hall.  
Roles:  Gary Warner – concept, implementation, atmospheres  Ian Hamilton – musical arrangement, manipulations 
Episode 02 track list: timings rounded to closest 5 second interval  02:55 - 26:15 soundscape for main exhibition hall ‘The First Emperor: China’s Entombed Warriors’ - excerpt END

03 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - The First Emperor AGNSW 2010

This program is a one-hour composition of evolving sonic construction shaped from my library of field recordings and other inquisitive recordings made in my studio and bush hut.

I work by selecting a collection of tracks of interest, randomly dropping them together on a digital timeline, then intuitively shaping the sounds by time-shifting,  re-arranging, layering and effecting, listening and re-listening until a certain enigmatic register emerges. 

I consider this practice to be a form of immaterial sculpture, locating and shaping sounds in aural and poetic space, setting up open-ended allusive and abstract relationships between disparately collected sounds gathered from my direct lived experience and from my formal experimentation in the studio.

These compositions can provide an interesting alternative soundscape experience - that is, an alternative to broadcast or streaming media services - for artists, writers, or anyone engaged in creative flow activity

06 SONIC SKETCHBOOKS - Untitled Intuitions

sonic sketchbooks is a podcast series about sound art, art music and field recording hosted by sydney-based artist gary warner

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