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| A Venn diagram of soundscape and ethnography with interpretation & soundscape compositions in the middle |
Drever, John Levack. “Soundscape composition: the convergence of ethnography and acousmatic music.” Organised Sound, 7 ((2002): 21-27. doi:10.1017/S1355771802001048
Thinking about nature films and their scores and sounds reminded me of the Drever article from 2002, where he makes the case that ethnography and soundscape composition for a kind of Venn diagram. Okay, okay, that’s reductive, but memory latches on to simple solutions.
Soundscape composition, in brief, uses noises from nature as a significant element in the compositional palette, manipulating recorded sounds or their electronically-generated equivalents to evoke a sense of place – in situ (as with sound-sculpture or sound installation) or as a re-creation or reminder of a place, real or imagined. (Hildegard Westerkamp’s "Kits Beach Soundwalk" (1989) interlays natural sounds with an interpretive text, for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hg96nU6ltLk).
Drever wants us to think about Soundscape composition as more than just sonic tourism. Since he believes that a significant element of soundscape is “the way it is perceived and understood by an individual or by a society,” he’s interested in drawing out that sense of meaning.
As a result, to qualify as “good” (my label) soundscape music, soundscape must be the driver at both the deep and the surface level of the composition. That is, it’s not enough to signal the twittering of birds, but there needs to be a form-based intentionality to how the environment intersects with its musical response. Best, he says, is when the work enhances our understanding of the world.
The composer must interpret and represent sounds in ways that respect the original environment--and also (he suggests) the original listeners' experiences. Drawing on Steven Feld’s 1994 study of Papau New Guinea and that society’s vocal mimicry of bird song as communication, he argues that since both ethnography and soundscape thinking approach their environment from the inside, a compositional response might be a useful representation of an ethnographer’s understanding of sound in a culture. Privileging that original meaning means that interpretation needs as much attention as aesthetics in the finished work.
Drever’s argument has been widely cited, but I was surprised on this reading that it didn’t help me much with my own thinking. Perhaps the arguments from 20 years ago have simply become commonplace. Of course I respect and want to understand the meanings the nuns of Thalbach (in Bregenz) assigned to the sounds that they heard. The chronicle account (in Ch 28) of the windstorm that trapped sister Margretha Schmidin as she was crossing the bridge on a wagon, and her three-fold recitation of the rosary as thanksgiving for her rescue when the wagon tipped draws attention both to nature and to prayer as ambient experiences. The noise and bluster, the confrontation with the cart-driving farmer and his wife, the articulated plea before the crossing and the thanksgiving prayers afterwards: each bead in her story (as told by the Chroniclist) is situated in a multisensory world. But I am not drawn to reconstruction in a compositionally creative sense; I’m not sure how that work would advance my understanding in any meaningful way. I suppose that’s because I carry the sounds of a storm, or a plea, or a prayer in my head, and create that internal soundtrack in the imagined recreation as I read (and then remember). I can open a YouTube tab and sample such things if I need; and my readers can too.
So my take-away is: I think we may have moved beyond that moment as our soundworld has shifted so strongly to that digitally archived space, and I think I might have more luck with sound and memory than sound and composition. But I suspect that we had to read cases like Drever’s for thinking interpretively about soundscapes before we could get to a place where they are perhaps a given of our discussion.
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