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Chris Watson, works on The Dreams of Gaia, Galapagos Islands

Introduction

By Jim Cummings

Founder, AcousticEcology.org (sound-related environmental issues, resources and info) and EarthEar.com (sound art catalog/collaborative)

From the roots of nature sound recording, originally focused on species identification and later popularized with LPs of much-loved natural sounds, the field of environmental sound production is branching wildly. Much as photography emerged as a creative medium a century ago, soundscape art is coming alive, exploring terrain that is at once more subtle, more vivid, and more experimental. I am pleased and excited to offer this online exhibition featuring some of the most creative, committed producers at work in the world today.

These new place-inspired artists deserve a spot alongside the writers, photographers, and filmmakers whose works have enriched our sense of the connections-and the rifts-between humanity, nature, and spirit. Whether you live in a city or at the edge of the wilderness (or, like most of us, in a place where the human world is expanding ever deeper into various local remnants of the primal richness that once filled your region) the work of these soundscape composers will help you notice the voice of the place you walk in day to day. For all of them, it's about being affected-and changed-by the experience of deep listening.

We've all had our own experiences of the power of sound. In the multi-layered community of voices around a woodland lake or the exhilarating heart of ridgeline thunderstorm, in the gentle ambience of a neighborhood or the soul-shaking urban cacophony, we find our place in something larger than ourselves. Often, we notice our soundscapes only in passing. At times, we sink in deeply and reap the rewards of connection, feeling a context within which humanity's dance is but a peculiarly inattentive piece of the whole.

Most of the time, it's not all that dramatic. . . . it's simply about letting sound expand our awareness, both in the practical sense of revealing actions and beings that are not visible from where we are, and in the more ineffable way that attention to sound can seem to make us more present in a place. Sound is connective, revealing the living webs of community and relationship that surround us; it is physical, emotional, and direct in ways that sight alone can never quite be. Certainly, paying attention to sound in consort with the visual beauties of the world leads to a deeply enriched experience.

Offering touchstones on a path of remembering, these sound sculptors have spent thousands of hours seeking, responding to, and recording the voices of our world-from mountains to subways. They then dance with their muses in the studio, weaving sonic essays and aural portraits in a delightful range of styles.

The paradox of recorded nature

The producers presented here all recognize that no recording can re-create the experience of being immersed in the sounds of a place. The limitations of recording and playback technology, and of course the physical power of direct experience, make this impossible. These recordings do not duplicate even just the sonic experience you'd have in any of the places they were made. In this is their strangeness, and their power. The world outside your door is likely indescribably more vivid than any recording; though there may be fewer, less "dramatic" sounds there, you are immersed in those sounds, they surround you, penetrate your skin, move invisibly through your heart and spirit, in ways these recordings never will.

Yet these sound recordists are not spending their lives in futile attempts to recreate natural soundscapes. No, they cast their lots to the currents of wonder, and the tiny fragments of their field work that end up on CDs are their most successful moments of evoking something central to that place. Or of a more general and universal respect for relationship. Or of a dream they had one early morning. Or perhaps a passing sense of delight, or sadness. No matter their intent, for your experience in hearing the work will be different than theirs, anyway. This is the way of the muse.

As you surely know from your own life, the kind of wonder you can remember, carry with you, speak about, or let your creativity play with, is not the same wonder you experience in the living moment. The memory of wonder that we bring back is like a photograph, a sketch, a scribbled note, compared to the moment of connection itself. As we listen to soundscape art, we are offered opportunities to have an experience that has links, both obvious and uncharted, with the moments we have known in the world (and with those we are yet to know). There is a stimulation of, and an exchange with, parts of ourselves and between ourselves and our planetary context. If we choose, we can be changed by this meeting with pure sound.

The hope of these recordists is that we may discover a deeper appreciation for the rich variety and abundant unity of the voice of our planet. Perhaps these aural portraits and sonic essays can remind us of ways that our voices may blend in more graciously, more respectfully, more receptively; from there, we may find ourselves echoing an old story, one that walks in relationship with all of life. As we grow back into this connectedness, modern humans in consort with our places, we might once again begin to hear - and know ourselves as a part of - the eternal story, told in its original language.

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