TIPO DISCURSIVO 1 TIPO DISCURSIVO 2 TIPO DISCURSIVO

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes of listening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be in the temporal continuum of place. By participating in the auditory moment, the continuously changing present can be more fully known through experience. The present becomes the past in a moment and activates memory thereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. What are we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to take time to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilised white society. Listening requires a sharing of temporal space; it is a communal experience very much defined by the sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a place to listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge as they are articulated by sound (Badt, 2001).

The importance of field recording in this portfolio has developed directly from my electroacoustic practice and has radically altered the way I listen to sound and the soundscape. Along with the actual composition of electroacoustic music, I credit the practice of field recording with being a major contributing factor to the development of my musical language throughout my Ph.D. candidature.

The auditioning process involved in field recording requires the listener to participate in the “auditory moment” and requires a deep and conscious engagement with the sound, or indeed soundscape, which is being recorded. The auditioner is not only listening to the sonic spectra of sounds, but is also analysing their sonic possibilities within the studio. S/He is not only listening to the soundscape of the metropolis, but studying that soundscape for keynotes, soundmarks and sound signals.

The focussing of attention to sound through field recording develops an ability to engage with the soundscape and, in auditory terms, to zoom in and out between the macro and micro sound worlds. This ability might be likened to Pauline Oliveros’ concept of Deep Listening, which she defines thus:

Deep Listening for me is learning to expand the perception of sounds to include the whole space/time continuum of sound - encountering the vastness and complexities as much as possible. Simultaneously one ought to be able to target a sound or sequence of sounds as a focus within the space/time continuum and to perceive the detail or trajectory of the sound or sequence of sounds. Such focus should always return to, or be within the whole of the space/time continuum (context).

Such expansion means that one is connected to the whole of the environment and beyond (Oliveros, 2005, p. xxiii).

The importance of this methodology will be seen as particularly relevant in the later discussions of the pieces Bempton Cliffs, Flight Paths and The Night Bride.

In preparation for both Bempton Cliffs and Flight Paths (the events of the opera taking place on and around the actual Bempton Cliffs), I visited the cliffs on

numerous occasions. My first visit was spent in the company of Steve Race from the RSPB (Royal Society for the Protection of Birds) who taught me about the location and the birds, their calls and their habits. The following visits were field recording trips, which had to be done very early in the morning before the huge numbers of tourists and ornithologists arrived on the cliff. This engagement with the birds, their behaviour and their habitat through field recording was crucial to the development of both of these pieces.

The story of The Night Bride takes place in the Székelyföld (Székely/Szekler Land) in Transylvania, an area I know quite well from visits during my time living in Hungary. For the tape sections of The Night Bride, although it would have been possible to construct these from sounds recorded in the UK, it was very important for me to use sounds collected in the area of Transylvania in which the story is set.

In addition to the personal relationship I have with the region and the journey to get there (I took this journey a number of times whilst living in Hungary, and the last time I took this route I was accompanied by Anikó Tóth), there were a number of practical and artistic reasons, too. The minimal mechanisation and road and air traffic in the region meant that it was much easier to capture the soundscape of the area, which would have been fairly close to the soundscape of the area at the time The Night Bride was set. Also, I wanted to ensure that the soundscapes used within The Night Bride were as accurate as possible and did not contain any sounds alien to the landscape in question, such as non-indigenous bird song.

Many factors in the recording of the source sounds and the development of the tape interludes relate to the concepts from R. Murray Schafer’s The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World discussed in the chapter on Flight Paths. In particular these were the concepts of keynote, soundmark, sound signal and sacred noise.