Sound Blog
AUDIO CAPTURE10/3/2017 Not satisfied with the sound of handheld audio recorders, here is a photo of my main tools for audio capture in the field.
I think the word capture is critical here as “captured” sound (or as I would prefer to call it audio) behaves and is perceived radically differently to that of the originating sound that “freely” occupied the space at which you captured it. It’s like lassoing a wild horse full of spirit that you have to tame and train to fit the performance requirements in your audio work or sound composition; you can groom it and gain its trust, but it’s never the quite the same once you have captured it, its spirit changes and there is just no going back once that happens. However even when captured its essence is still there somewhere in the sound, so the real trick is how you magnify that essence and make it sound free within the fenced parameter of your audio equipment. #soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks#fieldrecording #soundscape #audio
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A photo about today’s soundwalk: It’s like the soundscape of every city speaks its own unique language or at least dialect … if you listen closely for long enough and trust your ears, it will guide you along pathways where it will whisper its inner most secrets to you.
#soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks#psychogeography Just remembering what it use to sound like to lie on the ground as a child and listen to the gentle wind in the long grass. I use to imagine the sound of the wind moving arcoss the grass was caused by the tails of invisible dragons flying playfully past. Simon Schama in his book "Landscape and Memory" agues that we overlay mythology and the human imagination on to geographical locales and embody them in memory, and for me this is certainly true when I think about the farm I grew up on. Sound for me is always alive on many different levels and has huge potential to spark the imagination like nothing else can.
#soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks A photo from today’s soundwalk: Today I have been lying on the grass with my ear to the ground listening to little red flowers and leaves falling to the earth and thinking if I had ears like an ant or a small caterpillar then this would almost sound like an earthquake.
I love the sound of the trams in Melbourne and the ferries in Sydney. It may sound strange but the winter air sounds different to me in the two cities. The pace of the language and footsteps on a whole sounds different. The emerging themes in the words that you over hear in public (the semantic wordscape) are different. The speech melodies on a whole are different. The architecture of each city creates a different set of ambiances to interact with … speech melody
All microphones are fickle and untrustworthy, even the really good and expensive ones, because they all colour the audio recording in some way. It’s working with these colours (and painting in sound) that is the really interesting part of being a sound artist and composer.
#soundwalk #soundculture #colinblack #doctorblacksoundwalks SOUND TRACKING27/9/2016 Australian Aboriginal Trackers can ‘read' the land like a book – that is, they can work out the route an animal or person has taken days before, simply by studying the tracks left behind in the environment that most of us would be totally unaware of. When asked how he tracked, Mitamirri, a notable Aboriginal tracker from the early 20th century, said "I never bend down low, just walk slow round and round until I see more.” What I am proposing is sound tracking - this when you just walk slowly round and round in the environment, not really focusing on any sound to start with, just taking it all in until you hear more! If you find a sound trail then follow it to where it takes you and continue the process from there. There is no need to make a record of your sound tracking as it is already deeply embedded in your subconscious. #soundwalk #soundculture #colinblack #doctorblacksoundwalks My beloved loyal friend ...9/7/2016 Life seems to be an endless journey between there, here, nowhere, somewhere, then somewhere else. Sound however is always around me regardless of where I am or who I am with, like a beloved loyal friend who constantly whispers intimate secret truths in my ear.
#soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks A photo from today’s soundwalk: Once again “walking" back in time (through my sonic memories) and this time reflecting on the experience of undertaking a commission that involved making field recordings in a remote Australian desert. The first thing I noticed after driving all day, to the sound of the vehicle on straight red gravel roads (like the one in this photo), was that when I finally got to the chosen location, that the desert was acoustically like stepping into an anechoic chamber. Not at all like the echoic portrayals in the American western films, just silent with almost no acoustic reflections … it was in fact a sound recordist’s nightmare, what was I meant to record here! Nevertheless as John Cage has explained, nothing is absolute silence and out of the nothingness and silence, my ears were in a way reborn to focus on the the smallest of small sound events in the landscape. I use the word reborn as listening this intensely to the desert I found deepened my relationship with the land to the extent that I almost felt like I was becoming part of the landscape. The whole listening experience took on a magical, perhaps even spiritual aspect as the location started to sonically reveal some of its secrets to me one by one that were not at all visual. Through this process there was a kind of an acousmatic imaginary stratum being mapped onto the land where the listener acts as a catalyst to hold the layers in place. It was also a great way to experience a new quiet location … try it for yourself, sit very, very still and just listen for as long as you can. I found the longer I listened the less I wanted to leave!
#soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks Columbus's Ships ...26/3/2016 It has been theorised that Native Americans may have been unable to see Columbus's ships on the horizon when they fist appeared because they were so far removed from anything they had previously encountered and that the image of these types of vessels did not enter their visual reality until the ships had reached the shore. Sounds that are new or foreign to us can also operate in this stealth like fashion, seemingly undetectable until we have new ears and aural perspectives with which to hear them ... and like with Columbus's ships these sounds may also have the same potential to impact us.
#soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks Dr Black's Sound BlogA collections of thought's about sound culture Archives
March 2017
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