Manipulations of reality’s sounds: Drever on Soundscape Composition (11/6/24)

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.

Scoring for Calm or for Excitement? Smalley et al. (2023) on choices of sound in digital nature experiences (10/25/24)

I’m lucky enough to live on a farm, so wandering around in nature is something that comes as a matter of course for me, but I’m interested in how “digital nature” fits into the modern soundscapes we inhabit, and came across the Smalley et al. article while looking for a different reference. It was an interesting read, so here’s my summary!

Great Egret in a Florida waterway

Alexander J. Smalley et al., “Soundscapes, music, and memories: Exploring the factors that influence emotional responses to virtual nature content,” Journal of Environmental Psychology 89 (2023): #102060, https://www.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1787215/FULLTEXT01.pdf

The idea of visiting nature in a digital environment is popular, and was doubly so during the period of shelter-at-home recommendations during the first outbreak of the COVID pandemic. During that time, the authors of Smalley et al.’s “Soundscapes, music, and memories” got the idea of testing how the digital delivery of nature was actually working in terms of its emotional deliverables: cognitive reset, restorative potential calm, excitement, and awe. (They cite Kaplan & Kaplan 1989 on attention restoration theory, and Ulrich et al. 1991 on stress recovery theory as influences on their thinking). They had n=7636 participants, so provide a robust quantitative assessment of the field.

They noted that while we’ve done a lot of work to understand how viewing nature works, we’ve done less to understand how hearing such nature-scapes works in that digitally mediated environment, and they developed a clever plan to test the parameters that matter, using four different audio setups: silence, only music, only nature sounds, and a combination of music and nature sounds.

Since most documentaries have historically relied on big bold orchestral scores, they commissioned a “wall-of-sound” score (à la Hans Zimmer) to accompany their 3-minute digitally-generated nature scene, and (in collaboration with BBC Soundscapes for Wellbeing) measured the video’s impact with and without natural sounds layered in. (The natural sounds included things like bird song, water sounds, and the like.)

They were also interested in memory and its intersection with “affective outcomes triggered by digital nature content,” but noted that nostalgia (more particularly), being so often tied to specific musical cues, may not have been operational, given the newly generated score.

They found that:

The inclusion of music in our scene was associated with greater feelings of excitement (where it was the highest rated condition for this outcome), lower levels of calmness, and no significant change in restorative potential, awe, or nostalgia, compared to the silent control.

Music, in other words, is doing something, but it is not actually doing the restorative work of nature. To create excitement, we may be seeing “rhythmic entrainment” – the body responding to the upbeat rhythms of the music – and/or “emotional contagion,” in which the listener identifies with “the energy and excitement expressed by the music.”

But, since music meets only one of the positive parameters that “nature videos” can head for, the authors emphasize “the importance of multi-sensory depictions of nature.” Restoration and reset, and even awe at the beauty of the world, are supported by the hearing of the sounds that surround it.

My take-away is that video with nature sounds is the best choice if you’re trying to invoke a state of calm and get ready for another round of writing (ha!), but nature with music is better if you need that energy boost to clean the house.