What Are You Hearing?
The basic concept of how an audience member will hear SOUNDSCAPE is explained in the "What is SOUNDSCAPE" page. One will move through the space and experience different sounds as they go from one area to the next, following the musical communication that flows from area to area. When our recording took place we recorded the session in different ways. One of them was recording ten musicians playing simultaneously as shown in the diagram. A recording of all of these tracks bluntly played together is an interesting sound, but it does not really quite get at the experience of SOUNDSCAPE. What you will hear here is a manipulation of that recording. The following tracks have been mixed with entire tracks disappearing completely, then fading in at 50%, then dropping out, then other tracks fade to 80%, then slowing increase to 100%, then drop to 20%, then the first two tracks fade to 30% while the second four slowly climb to 70%, etc. These are not actual numbers, but explain the basic idea of what you are hearing. This is a very rough preliminary recording and we plan to develop the idea further.
| track 1 | track 2 | track 3 |
These tracks are single-sense translation (sound) of the multi-sensory experience of attending SOUNDSCAPE. Let's understand this idea by comparing it to something, which many painters deal with in their renderings of the real world. When we see the world around us, we do not see the one image, but two, one with each eye. Our brain translates this into "one" image. The brain also deals with interpreting other oddities of vision. Our peripheral vision contains distortions, which becomes greater as it becomes further from our direct line of sight. So what we are always experiencing visually is an abstraction of sensory information. This is why a photograph can appear flat. The camera cannot convey information in the same non-linear way that the brain can (however, great photographers do seem to find a way to make up for this).
These recordings convey more sensory dimension than a single sense would normally convey. In painting, the illusion of depth can be created through subtleties of rendering. Edges of lines, subtle distortions, color, and arrangement present in the image can make up for the canvas' flat surface. This is why a painting can potentially be more true to life than a photograph, which flattens a picture plane. Here, taking
sounds from different areas of the performance space and overlaying them with varying modulations of presence seeks to make one type of sensory information convey multiple. It seeks to make sound communicate motion, sound, and maybe more. If you're hoping this is leading to a CD versus vinyl debate, forget it, we're not going there. HEY! I said no ! We're NOT going there. There are used record stores for that sort of thing.
So, as a painting may convey reality better than the photograph, it was felt that the above recording could convey the feeling of SOUNDSCAPE better than a single-track recording, even though audience members would not be hearing this many instruments at once, as the basic format for experiencing the event, although there is an added element we are experimenting with to do this as an aside to the main concept of the production, but we won't get into that now. SOUNDSCAPE is not just audio, it is visual, and it is tactile. This method of recording and manipulating sound is also a piece in itself, and something that will be explored further. For more on these and other related concepts look for postings on the "Inspiration and Memeschemes" page in the near future.