My work is with sound: found sound; both ‘natural’ - of non-human origin, and also that created either directly or indirectly by humans.

Sound is often treated casually - people make sounds - ‘noise’ - often without thinking about it or the effect on others. The human brain thankfully has the ability to ignore or shut-out many of these sounds,
but these sounds, accumulated, make it hard for those of us living in well-populated areas to ever experience silence.

Trying to record natural sounds and listening in a concentrated manner reveals industrial noise, road traffic sounds, distant aircraft and many other sounds, even when recording in a rural area.

Humans have the power to control this or at least to raise objections. Consider the effect on wildlife: how is an owl supposed to hear its food moving? Birds must sing louder to attract a mate which in turn causes an energy deficit and may make breeding more unlikely. Are we unwittingly causing even more environmental damage?

Dawn Chorus 200503

This piece is a sonic exploration of subterranea. We begin above ground with a recording of a spring emerging from a peat bog next to Kes Tor, on Dartmoor, before plunging beneath the soil into the fizzing spluttering world of plant roots and insect activity. In the foreground are recordings of termites, stridulating ants and the calling song of the Braconid Parasitoid, a parasitic wasp that burrows
deep into tree roots to lay its larvae. In the background there are recordings of mulberry tree roots recorded with a hydrophone buried within its rhizophere. We then travel amid a number of bio-electrical recordings of a Pleurotus ostreatus, or oyster mushrooms, which are accompanied by recordings of tree roots of a Sitka Spruce tree. We come up for air with some geothermal upwelling’s and recordings of a mineral stream, before heading down again into the vaulted subterranean sewer system under the Holborn Viaduct, in London, where the long buried Fleet river roars along. Finally, we emerge out of the spring where we began, and float out onto the high moors.

The piece was commissioned by the Land Lines team at the University of Leeds as part of the Nature Revealed project which aims to make the invisible visible, and hopes to foster a multisensory appreciation of the natural world, to encourage us to care more for nature and our environment.  

For further information or to hear our other commissioned artists, please visit: https://landlinesproject.wordpress.com/

Image Credit: Collin Elder
http://www.collinelder.com

Land Lines Project