Sound Blog
11:00am studio break from #workingtheeartothebone and today’s self-directed soundwalk photo: The sound of mattock and shovel digging into the earth where I live. Making connections with place, thinking about unearthing the history of this site, and as I am in Australia thinking about the Aboriginal spirits of this site: asking their permission to break the soil. Linking the sound of mattock and shovel digging into the earth to my childhood memories of growing up on a farm where I was allocated a space behind the chicken shed to cultivate my own garden of choice (beans, pumpkins, lettuces, water melons and zucchinis … ). Making connections between my own physicality and linking these sounds somatically. Also, while swinging the mattock, digging deep into my mind and thinking about the concept of genetic memories ... trying to uncover these untilled memories of my pagan ancestors and how these sounds could have been heard as sonic symbols of re-birth, fertility and re-connection with Mother Earth.
Now I am back in the studio - with my #earstothegrindstone - digging up other sonic ideas! #soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks
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an acoustic public playground!10/3/2016 6:30pm studio break from #workingtheeartothebone and today’s soundwalk photo: The the resonating ascoutics of the underpass to the park with its 3000ms decay time and where just seconds after this photo was taken a family entered the underpass yelling "cooee" and "hello" ... some might call this underpass an acoustic public playground! :)
Now I am back in the studio thinking about the impulse responses, early reflections, diffusion, density, room sizes, decay times, damping, high frequency attenuation/decay, low frequency attenuation/decay, width and modulation ... #soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks John Cage exclaimed that he was ''not interested in the relationships between sounds and mushrooms” at least no more than "between sounds and other sounds.’’ Nevertheless, for Cage, the way mushrooms grew haphazardly represented a type of disordered freedom from determination and meaning. However if we think about Paul Carter’s idea of "echoic mimicry” as applied to cross-cultural encounters and macaronics, the apparent haphazard spawning patterns of mushroom are in someways similar to the dynamic auditory topography and morphology of these encounters. That is sound can act like spawn across culturally isolated linguistic groups in mycelium thread-like collections of phonemes, that can suddenly give rise to a radiating mushrooming of sonic mis-interputations and even a new babel language of encounter. Try it yourself, have a conversation with someone who does not speak any language you can understand. While doing this try listening to yourself to monitor if or how your speech is adapting throughout this encounter to form a kind of analogue of the other person’s language. If you notice that you have started to vocally adjust in this way or even started to make up new words then the sonic spawn is starting to grow in the substrate of the union!
I have also made recordings of picking small mushrooms in the arctic circle in Sweden. You can hear this sound on the first track on my "Soundprints: Sealed In Sweden” album (see below link). Listen out for the small popping sounds ... https://colinblack.bandcamp.com/album/soundprints-sealed-in-sweden #soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks So super cute: I found this today while I was working. It's a drawing by Christina, who I interviewed (with here parent’s permission and under their supervision) when she was about four-years-old, for a project I was completing for the ABC (in Australia). The big black object is the microphone I interviewed her with. I really like how she has placed the microphone as if it enters my left ear, causes some reaction in me (see facial expression) and then kind of exits my right ear to leave the picture on the right side of the drawing (which in most western cultures symbolises the future). It led me to think about how sound recordings increasingly become dislocated over time, Christina is now a teenager, and like in her drawing her voice recording is somewhere in her past (she is positioned on the left hand side of the drawing) and positioned behind me (and my continuing experiences).
Apart from the audio's spatial dislocation or Schizophonic elements (R. Murray Schafer) and dislocation over time or Schizochronic elements (John Potts), the audio artefact also transforms as the cultural discursive space evolves around it in a kind of schizomorphcultural fashion, where the past culture becomes increasingly dislocated from the present culture and the meaning of the audio artefact changes, morphs and in some cases is completely lost. Nevertheless, you can hear Christina’s four-years-old voice on the opening and closing tracks of the resulting work I entitled The Ears Outside My Listening Room that ended up winning the Prix Italia for the ABC, by going to http://www.abc.net.au/classic/content/2013/01/10/3666980.htm #soundwalk #colinblack #soundculture #doctorblacksoundwalks Dr Black's Sound BlogA collections of thought's about sound culture Archives
March 2017
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