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David Dunn, Skydrift

Quotes from the Field

> JONATHON STORM

"Sometimes, I get shy, and tell people I'm a "nature sound recordist." But actually, I'm a composer for the instrument-or orchestra of instruments-called "nature." And, I'm composing through the whole process of my work."

> GORDON HEMPTON (Evoking the sounds of the driftwood forest on a cobblestone beach)
". . . So not only are you dealing with this huge bass violin just soothing your soul in great long strokes as if there were some magic moment that you witnessed there on the beach, but also you're being serenaded with all these notes of the pebbles and the sand, the hush, and never is the moment the same, and every log has a different tonal quality. . . What we are connected with as a listener is not some sort of cheap thrill or whatever will sell volume, we have an opportunity to connect the audience further with the beauty they walk through and be better able to enjoy themselves and explore freely and know that these opportunities are still waiting for them."

  > DAVID DUNN
"My hope is that artists can function as some sort of systems thinkers, that they can bring not only an awareness that leads to discoveries that we wouldn't ordinarily make, but that we also extend our senses, through the technology, in a way that allows us to appreciate it in a different way and move a little gentler in relationship to it."

  > LANG ELLIOT
"What I'm most interested in conveying first and foremost is the extraordinary experience of the sounds that these things make, and how they captivate you, even if you don't know anything (about what they are). . . . So it's not really striving to say "OK, here's the American Prairie, and here's all these birds that migrate across it in the spring, and here's all the ones that breed in the potholes, and here's this and here's that," it's more like "listen to these incredible sounds!" And I'll tell you what's making them, but it's the experience that's the most important thing."

  > DAVID DUNN
"I have mixed feelings. . . Part of this is the idea of being able to expand access to the non-human world in a way which is non-destructive; the other side of it is that it ends up just being another level of exploitation and commodotizing the environment in the same way we've commodotized every other aspect of it."

  > HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP
"I hear the soundscape as a language with which places and societies express themselves. In the face of rampant noise pollution, I want to be understanding and caring of this "language" and how it is "spoken." I compose with any sound that the environment offers to the microphone, just as a writer works with all the words that a language provides."

  > GORDON HEMPTON
"Sound is wonderful, because, different than sight (which is also beautiful, of course), sound connects things, and sound accommodates many voices at one time and they remain intelligible. Whereas with sight, we see one object, and very rarely do we actually have transparencies and reflections. Sound, as a medium, aesthetically allows us to experience environment as connections between living things, and cycles, and rhythms."

  > BERNIE KRAUSE
"It took me ten years to learn to record ocean waves."

  > HILDEGARD WESTERKAMP
"I transform sound in order to highlight its original contours and meanings, similar to the manner in which a caricaturist sharpens the contours and our perceptions of a persons' face."

  > DAVID ROTHENBERG

"If you manage to block out all sound, you will have no trouble looking around at the warp and woof of the world, but you will feel an outsider, detached from the goings on. Sound puts us into the picture, or makes the picture more than an image. As the Inuit asks the visitor coming in out of the cold: speak so that I may see you. Add a voice, even a whisper, so that the other is really there."


  > DAVID DUNN

"My take on all this is trying to elevate soundscape recording as an art genre, in the same way that photography did that in the 1920's."

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Quotes