1. Recording the actual sound at location

I will begin the article with an experiential account of Landscape in Metamorphoses, an audio art project drawing on recordings made in Tumbani, an area situated in the tribal-dominated Bengal–Jharkhand border of north-east India. In recent times, the area has been rapidly developing into an industrial zone, transforming its picturesque landscape, historically grounded in its rich natural habitat and the community livelihood of indigenous people. Landscape in Metamorphoses records and reconstructs the location concerned, with comparable auditory transformations of ‘reality’ within a soundscape composition, combining phonographic recordings of the area and subsequent audio design into more ‘musically’ constructed sound layers and samples. An extensive collection of phonographic material, collected at several fieldwork visits, forms a digital archive that was used as the source of material in the composed work. The work is primarily based on the hypothesis of the auditory mediation of place in audio art practice, considering this in the context of transformation from the original acoustic to the electroacoustic environment. The work will be used throughout this article to develop and support this hypothesis.

Historically, Tumbani is an area whose landscape has undergone gradual transition. After the Second World War, the area was affected by several changes: India's emerging urbanising periphery and the establishment of inter-state road transport; a residential school; the construction of an airbase; and a slow industrialisation process as a consequence of the natural resources of granite stone in the area. Since then this small region has been designated a Special Economic Zone (SEZ), producing a large amount of stone chips for the concrete industry and employing both the landscape and the local people in the industrialisation and development process. In transforming from verdant pastures into an SEZ, as with many other similar locales in developing India, Tumbani is representative – slowly succumbing to its inevitable contact with a fast-changing and globalising world. In doing so it has displaced its cultural roots and traditions, instead developing the homogenised appearance of the typical industrial zone. In the process, socioeconomic development has affected the life and landscape of indigenous habitation through its intervention in the environment and ecosystem at large. Tumbani is an interesting case of cross-fertilisation between multiple development processes. In one way, industrial change has brought development of the land and, in another, improvement in the livelihood of the population, who according to Raymond Dasmann can be called ‘ecosystem people’ (Dasmann Reference Dasmann2002), traditionally relying on the natural environment of their locality for everyday sustenance and material needs. But the holistic idea of development of land and livelihood is debatable; questions can be raised about how and in what ways the landscape and indigenous people are adapting to industrialising processes, and what could be the probable consequences.

Moreover, the effect of development in the area of Tumbani is not homogeneous: marks of change are not evenly distributed and evident throughout the region, and in addition the evidence of change from earlier times and more recent transformations are simultaneously apparent. For example: traditional cultural practices of the tribal community gradually fade away under pressure of changes in livelihood, but some fragmented parts of the community still perform ritual chants, even if within the overwhelming soundscape of popular film songs from radio and soap operas in their television sets. School buildings still remain empty on most days, but a thriving marketplace is an indication of a developing transaction-based culture. These incongruities in cultural dynamics present Tumbani as a fertile site for observation, investigation and experiencing, and a significant location for making phonographic recordings, to feed into soundscape composition as audio artwork. Landscape in Metamorphoses as an audio art project forms an artistic investigation into the external, imposed transformation of landscape, people and natural acoustic environment, within composition – as a reconstruction of the embodied trajectory of the location, through the medium of sound. Through the practice of audio art, contemporary and memory associations in relation to the location are represented in the composition, developed from the collected field recordings. The process of composing environmental sounds sculpts the archaeology of recollection, grounded in recordings as actuality of the location – collected and archived field recordings forming ‘sonic menageries’ on which to draw. Because this project has not only been a sonic representation of a transfiguring landscape; it has also become a commentary on the decomposition of location-based personal memory-associations. I, the author of this article, grew up in Tumbani as a boy, being part of the group of ‘outsiders’ in the area (representative myself of urban influence) who might be termed ‘biosphere people’ (Dasmann 1988) – exploring and exploiting natural resources for growth. This gamut of people finds its own place in the landscape, in a ‘shaky’ but warm, sincere – but futile – interaction with the aboriginal community. The outcome of this interaction has turned out to be the slow process of urbanisation of the landscape, leaving its own residue of sonic objects on the transitory place.

Throughout my growing-up years I experienced a comparable slow and intrinsic transformation within my personal association with the location. Now, as an outsider to the land and ecosystem, I have observed how the audiovisual environment of the place is continuously reshaping under industrial, urban and global influences. At the same time I have also experienced my own role shifting, from participation to performance. These experiences have been qualitative rather than quantitative, and in this manner they have catalysed my development as an audio practitioner, phonographer and field recording artist. Starting from my motivation to return, revisit and rediscover the area, especially via the auditory domain, I undertook a phonographic ‘expedition’ to the area, from 2007 to 2008. Doing this, I was affected by a sense of nostalgia, for example noticing that tribal workers, on their way to work, were not performing the songs I knew from my childhood days, or noticing the earth-grinding machine of a nearby stone factory reverberating in the ‘background’ of the landscape, engulfing the breathing sound of endangered insects. From the very moment I started to make the field recordings I felt it was my artistic responsibility to recreate the ‘experienced location’ I remembered, nostalgically, from childhood. The phonographic expedition and the process of its reproduction as performance have thus sought to investigate also how the topographic environment of my childhood has been transfigured into a different ecosystem, in the process questioning the actuality of the landscape in terms of memory.

In my earliest childhood, there was an old short-wave radio in our house with a prominent mark on the BBC World Service channel frequency, indicating just how frequently we tuned to this radio station. I remember my evenings, when the sound from this radio, in the form of classical music and news, occupied a specific acoustic space around our everyday living. My house was situated in a rather remote quarter on the outskirts of a tribal habitation, being relatively distant from the nearby township, and close to tribal villages. So the BBC Symphony Orchestra and news from an unseen but imagined locale intruded on the evening quiet of this location. The radio-mediated sound of a full orchestra and speeches with a distinctly British accent gradually became a familiar sound experience for me. In fact, unlike the local sonic elements, such as the sound of traditional drums and string instruments, workers’ songs and everyday ambience, the sound from BBC became identified (for me) as the soundscape of my location. Socially, the BBC World Service had been seen as an authentic news service providing a particular orientation for art and culture in English-educated Bengali middle-class families since the First World War. Although the one-way traffic of radio suggested the strangeness of an acoustic space questioning locative reality, it could also establish a hearing experience of ‘place’, by creating a trans-local scheme of sound through which a globally dispersed media became associated by the listener with place. According to Hadley Cantril and other radio researchers, radio represents a unique psychological phenomenon where listening becomes suggestive of place-based sonic activities. But, at the same time, ‘these primarily developmental accounts posit the existence of a history of listening and at the same time close it down; radio, and sound recording become the agents of acoustic (urbanity) modernity’ (Sterne Reference Sterne2003).

So, what the apparently surreal ‘sound presence’ for my actual location was actually a fragmented sound of European classical music broadcast from the BBC – a specific reception of mediated sound that was subjectively chosen from the more generalised presence of sound of short-wave radio, whereby the trans-local sounds have been supplied by a medium beyond the location, providing associations ostensibly ‘free of place’ to the listener's ears. But, from a different perspective, those sounds could be localised to somebody situated in a place where, as a typical listening example, the compositions of Peter Maxwell Davies might normally be performed and recorded live; sounds broadcast are mediated in one way and received in the ear biased by a certain cultural upbringing rather than a natural choice. The ability to accept such broadcast materials of course depended mostly on the exposure, awareness and access in the pre-globalised Bengali speaking society. For my tribal counterpart from the village even some of my vocabularies were ‘unreal’ sounds; only an area seen around his eyes and heard since his birth existed for him, the idea of a global world didn't as yet exist. As a result, sound from the BBC would be an alien sonic context for his ears; his known sound events were quite constrained within his locality, as he normally had very limited media access.

What was the sonic actuality of the tribal boy? An active inhabitant of his environment, the world immediately surrounding his ears offered a rich, diverse and wide range of aural imagery, starting from the manmade sounds of everyday ambience to the sound of cattle and animals; natural elements like wind from northern grasslands; water of handmade wells and small water-bodies; sound from the creaking of branches while they move in a mild breeze; the rhythmic sound of insects and birds, and the minute sounds of falling leaves; sounds from the performance of the traditional instruments such as dhak and banshi; the oral repertory of the primordial tribal language, a legacy of speech and vocabulary that is threatened by the influence of a pervasive Bengali idiom; the sound of raindrops and the residual audio-spectacle of the absorption of water in red soil; the sound of distance within the perspective of an open landscape – he evidently grew up with all these sounds, which naturally became unobtrusively ‘actual’ to his ecosystem.

On the other hand, my mediatised ears couldn't accommodate the very first hearing of tribal ritual drum within my own biosphere, even though it was part of the local soundscape. Through a diet of regular traditional performances my hearing became accustomed to the sound of indigenous rhythms, but otherwise my own familiar soundscape would be the classical music played back in a domestic compact stereo cassette player, disc changer or broadcast from the radio set, in a typical Bengali household.

However, the repeated broadcast of popular Hindi film songs from one or two newly bought radio sets in the village were gradually accepted as ‘actual’ sound events for my tribal friend, blurring the boundary between ‘us’ and ‘them’. Again, the process of acceptance of new sound events was primarily dependent on the conditions of aural exposure and awareness. And, in the process the actuality or rather the ‘realness’ of a sound event was derived by listeners’ subjective acceptance, based on its mediation through place associations. The trajectory – how sound out-of-place becomes sound-of-place – is itself an example of the recontextualisation of sound events, in terms of the association of locale with sound, which is consequently the subject of investigations into the sources of sound production and transmission. R. Murray Schafer writes in his seminal work ‘The Soundscape’:

A tribal ritual drum is essentially producing sound from the location of its ‘actual’ habitation, and its cultural association with locative tradition supplies the particular characteristic of that sound event. In this definition, the phenomenon of displacement of sound from source is not relevant; every sound object is place-based and local. When the sound is recorded and subsequently transmitted through a communication medium, mediated in the creative process of field recording and received by the audience in the form of a soundscape composition (by means of both audio design and ‘musical’ processes), sound transcends its place association through its reproduction. In this process sound finds mobility of a trans-local order if the media is dispersed out-of-place: for example, represented as a CD release or diffused in concert, the same or similar in each performance. Murray Schafer comments:

In the discussion of phonographic sound recording, discourse on the displacement of the ‘actuality’ of sound from its location-specificity is further intensified in the context of sonic mediation in artistic production, where both the equivalence and the apparent shifts between locative sonic actuality and recorded sound content are questioned, destabilised and re-established through the practice of field recording itself, and further mediated by the composition process – here in the audio art project Landscape in Metamorphoses.

While recording the sounds of the location of Tumbani, the first thing that strikes me, as a listener, is the juxtaposition and superimposition of sound elements of various timbres, somehow within an elusive silence. If the place is crowded with people, I hear certain voices that stand out; if the area of recording is in a village setting, I hear a bird call beside a distant car horn; in a busy urbanising environment, I hear traffic merged with sound from a muddy loudspeaker dispersing slogans. It is a un-mediatised hearing that puts the ears into a mode of recording infinite sound events occurring at a location (Altman Reference Altman1992). A sensitive omnidirectional microphone positioned within the location can replace the ears, recording the multi-layered acoustic field but representing it within the single time-line of that recorded sound. The recording will transmit the sonic actuality of the location if multiple recording techniques are employed to capture the fuller spectrum of frequency content within the location that needs detailed mapping in aural terms. The field recording during the project Landscape in Metamorphoses was a practice of mapping and documenting the sound of Tumbani in an authentically location-specific manner, with a multi-channel recording used to translate the process of listening to the place to the recording media. In this intention to document an in-depth and comprehensive actuality of sound, in order to capture detailed aural information from the location, a combination of digital field recording techniques have been considered. A binaural microphone was used to record the surrounding space, while a shotgun was used to record directional sounds that characterised the locative sound environment; additionally, a sensitive contact microphone captured minute vibrations offered by the place while a mid-stereo rig was used to record an authentic stereo image of the location. Each variation of microphone positioning, used to pick up and collect the locative sound content as ‘sonic menageries’, approached Tumbani as itself a place that provides a live repository of sound events – or the building blocks of the composition in question.

2. Composition as mediation of recorded sound

The practice and production of audio art by means of recorded environmental sound redefines space and time, focusing our attention and changing our perception of place; this can be accomplished through the mediation of location via soundscape composition, using field recording as the strategy to gather basic musical materials. Soundscape composition can be termed a form of ‘electro-acoustic music characterized by a presence of recognizable environmental sounds and contexts, the purpose being to invoke listener's associations, memories and imagination related to place; the exercise of framing environmental sound by taking it out of context, and directing listener's attention to it as a representation, by means of a compositional technique that is minimal, involving mostly selection, inclusive editing, cross-fading, sampling, looping, synthesizing’ (Truax Reference Truax2001: 4) – and I would add by means of spatialising the recorded sound by digital means, where the idea behind the process of field recording has been to capture random sound events from the location while incorporating selection and elimination. In soundscape composition a given place can be selected as the location of recording sound elements simply by reason of the variety of sonic activities in the chosen place, but in general electroacoustic processing of recorded sound samples within a programming environment remains the basic strategy to mediate listening within the compositional domain. Soundscape composition is, thus, a juxtaposition of ethnography and electroacoustic music/audio artwork, as John Drever points out in Organised Sound (Reference Drever2002).

However, any human auditory interaction with the individual's ethno-environment initiates a dynamic mediation of the auditory space as a sonic construct. In the field of communication theory, this interaction is regarded as medially locative and grounded on an acoustic-communicatory perspective (Truax Reference Truax2001); that is how the interaction can be studied, using an auditory approach to represent the environment in terms of its locative sound content. According to theories of sound media, the auditory environment of a location consists of an infinite number of sound events (Altman Reference Altman1992); a listener concentrates on certain events, and information extracted is essentially a partial image of the environment, and the cognitive process of selection and elimination largely depends on the context of the listener. As a result, sonic interaction with a locative environment cannot limit itself to registering aural information, but responds by giving shape to the information as a sonic construct (in the form of a soundscape) that provides the aural perception of the location. I will explore further the manner in which this process of construction can be simulated in a work of soundscape composition by first the methodologies of the field recording itself, and then by audio processing in terms of mediating the ecology of ethno-environmental sounds in the electroacoustic domain.

In the artistic mediation of sound environment through audio art production, as in soundscape composition, the aural perception of the everyday auditory environment is communicated within the realm of experimental music by location-specific sound recording and audio processing that itself transcends environmental actuality, relocating recorded sound in the domain of electroacoustic composition/digital music. The work is essentially drawn from a repository of sonic events recorded from the auditory space, these audio ‘artefacts’ further disembodied from the location, and composed using such tools as digital processing and computer-based spatialisation techniques. This repository of recorded sonic events is thus itself a construct of the auditory interaction of the listener. And this construct can be further simulated into artistic production, so being perceived as an electroacoustically mediated representation of the listener's association with their environment and the ecosystem or biosphere at large. Composing proceeds by means of the electroacoustic processing of audio material recorded from the environment that the listener belongs to, the ‘sonic menagerie’ of collected disembodied sounds becoming analogous to the colours on an artist's working palette. The process sheds light on how the artistic abstraction of recorded sound in producing audio art is a mediation of the listening to the location. In this hypothesis, soundscape composition can be considered as an audio art form that stems from both location-specific sound recording and subsequent studio processing of the ‘artistic material’ of recorded and disembodied environmental sound (Truax Reference Truax2007).

Based on this hypothesis, the compositional processes for Landscape in Metamorphoses involved using samples of field-recorded sound manipulated in programming environments such as Cubase, using an array of typical plugins such as multi-band compressor, looping, reverb and audio effects like time-stretching and dynamic EQ, and editing and mixing techniques to mix a stereo composition. The work, in a musically narrative structure, reconstructs the artist's particular interaction with the locative auditory environment by mixing the fragmented audio clips – recordings of both environmental and industrial sound events from the location. Each clip has been derived by a sequential process: first recorded by listening to the acoustic actuality of the location, then re-contextualised into the electroacoustic domain of soundscape composition, where the original ecological discourse between the multitude of recorded sound events has now been reconstructed in a different context, and with different sociopolitical connotations (Sound example 1).

3. Electroacoustic ecology: dislocating landscape

Listening to Landscape in Metamorphoses is a separate experience from listening to the location of Tumbani itself, although ‘actual’ sound events have been recorded and used in the composition. At the original location, the listener/artist registers place-related auditory information as temporal events extracted from his experience. The recording process formulates how the listener/artist reacts to the sonic interaction in a pure, blind listening of sound (Francisco López, Buildings, Reference López2001) from a particular location. Musical exploration of the location by field recording and subsequent soundscaping exercises abstraction by artistic mediation of the location, with the intention of building knowledge concerning the role played by recorded and disembodied sound, respectively, in a composition when mediating the ecology of location-specific acoustic environment in the electroacoustic domain.

The work begins with unprocessed cross-fades of natural environmental sounds of birds chirping; the landscape of Tumbani is introduced with sounds from the rural habitat, human-made sounds such as speech, and sounds from cattle. From the overtures of a busy marketplace the work gradually unfolds a narrative structure which is abruptly interrupted by the closely recorded sound of tree branches in a breeze; the placing of this abstracted sound texture in the work incorporates a musical treatment of environmental sound, a methodology that is further used in the later part of the work as a representation of the metamorphoses the location undergoes, in a transformation from a natural environment to an industrial zone. The gradual intensification of the audio processing of field-recorded sound gradually abstracts the sense of location, as observed by a reviewer in Textura magazine:

During the work's trajectory, as described, the earlier section cross-fading unprocessed natural environmental sound recordings undergoes transformation by a gradual intensification and incorporation of processed industrial-sounding materials, through equalisation, looping, compression and other electroacoustic methods. The intention is to authentically represent the historical transition experienced in Tumbani, and the affect on its soundscape – from a rich hi-fi (high-fidelity) acoustic environment with ‘more perspective in foreground and background’ (Shafer 1994) to a lo-fi (low-fidelity) soundscape with a reduced ‘aural space’, gradually mutating sound information into an industrial noisescape, where ‘the rhythms of daily routine are, significantly eroded (Shafer 1994). The work simulates this transformation of the location, over time, here as a journey from the landscape itself as source, to production of audio art through the processes of recording and composition – what Shafer, in an earlier quotation (1994: 6) refers to as ‘original’ (actual) sound and its subsequent transmission. It is the compositional process itself that captures that journey whereby sound gets ‘dislocated’ from the auditory source of the acoustic environment of the landscape of Tumbani to the electroacoustic environment of the soundscape composition Landscape in Metamorphoses. Field-recorded sounds are freed from the ecological discourse of locative/ethnographic acoustic environment of Tumbani, once they exist as disembodied sonic menageries, and when further electroacoustically treated in the composition. Although recognisability of the source material is maintained for the listener, even after undergoing artistic transformation (Truax Reference Truax2007), the work in its reproduction as a stereo acousmatic piece creates a parallel listening experience to the original time and place – one of different temporality, spatiality and perspective, with a different ecosystem of sound altogether.

By means of its origination and its subsequent artistic mediation, a sound event is dislocated, while recording/mediating its localness/origin if not its identity. That is, the sound of a bird recorded remains the sound of a bird, but the art of field recording transmits the sound in a different perspective. Theoreticians such as Michel Chion indeed suggest that sound recording changes the trajectory of its event, and subsequently its identity (Chion Reference Chion1994); accordingly, field recording and the subsequent artistic mediation of sound recorded from a landscape creates a different sound-landscape.

4. Soundscape and location-specific identity: observation without conclusion

The problem of identity and source recognition of a sound (or in the case of the discussion in this article, a location) on a globally dispersed media map is evident in the way a reviewer writes about the CD release of Landscape in Metamorphoses. The issue of the recognition of a ‘local sound identity’ in a post-global context has in fact received ample attention in the theoretical platforms of media convergence, difference and hybridisation. Anna Cvetkovich and Douglas Kellner write in Articulating the Global and the Local:

How will these emancipatory forms appear? In the arena of audio/media art and electroacoustic/digital music, forms such as soundscape composition might possibly be able to answer this question. In the discourse of hybrid identities, soundscape composition as a musical form doesn't demand identification in the context of post-global media, being location-specific rather than culture-specific. There might be some place-based or geographically biased sonic identities, but soundscape composition as an audio media art form always suggests an abstract sense of identity; it wants to transcend its mere origin by dispersing towards abstraction of the source material. So, post-global media space is a perfect playground for local sounds that aspire to universal recognition and appreciation. How are local sounds posited in this transitory landscape of homelessness, a landscape of nomads who celebrate mobility over everything? In this flexible and itinerant coordination of things, the domain of sound is rather taken for granted; it is sound where the abstraction of identity is practised to greater success and the sense of community and location embedded in a piece of soundscape composition is eradicated as it moves in the post-global ‘location-free’ space because of sound medium's necessity to dissociate from its source as an event in order to be perceived and understood (Altman Reference Altman1992).

We can observe, if not conclude, that ecosystems and biospheres are merging with each other in the post-global sound map, blurring identities. I would not be surprised to find my tribal counterpart from my early childhood in Tumbani, now in a metropolis with a laptop on his shoulder or computer tablet in his pocket. Maybe we would speak in the same English, with the same mediated accent, and maybe we would hear the same music – perhaps even the digital release of Landscape in Metamorphoses through our earplugs coming from a portable media device. Local, regional and national identities could provide the only truly hybrid amalgam of local identities and culture. The media could cater to the demands of providing new materials to ‘rework’ one's identity, and could empower people to evolve from creating traditional forms and styles to the creation of new, more emancipatory forms. Field-recorded sounds are relieved of the burden of identity (as are placeless musical forms such as experimental soundscapes), having originated from ‘local’, but lost their place-association over the course of being composed into an artwork. They remain in the arena of post-global sound, in the ever evaporating localness of being.