Geosound

Field recording, composition and poetic text are three forms of writing. Each form of writing already involves a kind of translation. In the broadest sense, a field recording is sound written by the Earth, or a part of it anyway, on to – or into – the apparatus of the recorder. The device translates vibration into electrical impulses that are at some point translated back into vibration, having undergone a significant change appropriate to the medium of performance or playback. The composer writes symbols on paper meant to represent sounds and silences – or at least the potential for these. This has to be translated by a performer into actual sound, which will inevitably be different to some degree from what a composer might have imagined. The written text also represents sounds that will have to be translated by the mind of the reader into actual or virtual sound. An image described in a text is sketched with a degree of abstraction that asks the reader to fill in the spaces.

I am interested in the linkages that can be formed between pairs of these forms of writing, and want to discuss these in two compositions I have been involved in creating: crosshatches, a recording project with Toshiya Tsunoda, and July Mountain for field recordings and percussion.

I want to talk not just about the how the music was written and how it was conceived, but especially about its connection with something I am going to term Geosound. Geosound is sound in relation to the Earth. Geography tells us about the terrain of the Earth and how human cultures inhabit it. Geosound as I conceive of it, must tell us about the sonic terrain and the musical cultures that arise on the Earth. It must make explicit the usually implicit connection between the place where we are situated and how this place conditions the sounds we make.

This way of theorising sound is new (or it seems that way to me) and thus must be, for the moment, somewhat provisional.