essay research pt 4?

Tallin, city of Culture 2011 and soundscapes
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Max Neuhaus (drawings), went on to pioneer artistic activities outside conventional cultural contexts and began to realize sound works anonymously in public places, developing art forms of his own. Neuhaus' initial foray into this practice was a project titled Listen!, which extended Cage's idea that environmental sound could be heard as music. Neuhaus would invite audiences to a venue, stamp their hands with the word "listen," and then take them on a tour of local urban and industrial soundscapes.  more ubu feedback
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make official video clips for famous artists...
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Bruce Odland and Sam Auinger


Music is more than an object of study: it is a way of perceiving the world ... Music, the organization of noise reflects themanufacture of society. (Jacques Attali)
One also can go further and claim that hearing habits are in a direct connection with thinking structures. (Sam Auinger,1988)
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...As R. Murray Schafer outlines it, any ecosystem or environment has a sonic character which comes from the particular economy of sounds which bestow upon this system its 'signature tune'. When the sounds of an environment lose their definition they tend toward white noise. And white noise, as Schafer hears it, is the dominant key of the lo-fi soundscape
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What the musical richness conveys is information about the health of the environment, about the integrity of its spaces, dimensions and distances. Degraded environments will be sparsely orchestrated and badly tuned, while relatively undisturbed habitats will be harmonically subtler and rhythmically more various. These are the precise meanings that the music of the bush communicates. The musical signature of a natural environment may be essential to its survival.⁹ 

Gilbert's labour of listening, recording, and tuning such an environment is of course a cultural practice and a specifically compositional one, but it is above all to be heard within  a larger ecological / conservationist practice. The perspective of listening opened by the microphone is 'scientific' and bio-acoustic in spirit, as well as musical. But it is the precision instruments of microphone and its hi-fi 'pick-up' via low noise analogue and now digital recording technology, which gives this practice its epistemological and ecological foundations. Through hi-fi, sound presents itself as the distilled spirit of the real -- its vibration, its invisible presence
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Schafer suggested in his essay 'Radical Radio', that we might 
put microphones in remote locations uninhabited by humans and broadcast what ever might be happening out there; the sounds of wind and rain, the cries of birds and animals -- all the uneventful events of the natural landscape transmitted without editing into the hearts of the cities
...adds: 'It seem[s]...that since man has been pumping his affairs out into the natural soundscape, a little natural wisdom might be a useful antidote'. In this he is echoing an almost shamanistic belief that nature's forces (through sound) could be gathered up and channelled by a medium, by a healer, and brought to bear on the sick body (traumas) of the patient. The patient was in need of being touched by nature's voices and of being infused with their healing power. Here that patient is culture. But in Schafer's vision, we are bound by the essential dualism of the western metaphysical tradition. In these terms culture is as distinctly separate and distant from nature as is the occidental trope of wilderness

...Nature is such a potent symbol of innocence partly because 'she' is imagined to be without technology. Man is not in nature partly because he is not seen, is not the spectacle (maybe here)
...Nature, woman, and all kinds of cultures are not to be seen as threatened 'acted-upon' reserves. As long as we see ourselves and our tools outside of nature's reserve (or try to conceal them, even if in the name of ecological protection), we set up an impossible ecology beyond the reach of history or politics, an ecology that will always consider 'us' (those with tools, technology) as exiles inhabiting an 'offworld', a kind of 'spaceship earth', where survival becomes a matter of regular reconnaissance trips to nature (hunting trips?) in order to re-infuse sick culture with nature's healing spirit. In this light, the 'New Age' appears naively unaware of history. Women, 'noble savages', children, animals and nature are often reduced to the realm of the bewildered, the speechless, the static, even when removed to the magical and high-definitional realm of high fidelity. That other nature we call culture (coming from agriculture, cultivation) is simply edited out. Cultivation now 'appears' to leave no traces, no history, just as the sound designer, in faithfully recording the wilderness (and representing it to the public) seeks to silence all noises of his passing, particularly the excessive rustle of his history-writing-in-sound.   
...(les Gilbert) At the time I was using a PCMF1 digital [audio tape] recorder which for the first time allowed me to make complete two hour uninterrupted recordings of an environment. That becomes a process then of the observation of the environment -- lizards walk over your feet, things which wouldn't happen in the normal course of events happen. In this type of recording, you have to sit in this place, totally still for two hours. I then realized this was an amazing meditative experience which provided a real sense of connectedness to what I was doing; so when I'm recreating these things [as sound documents] I'm recreating, to myself, the essence of those experiences. I'm totally convinced that somehow or other the power of those things allows something to be transferred
...  R. Murray Schafer coined the term 'schizophonia' in the 1970s to describe the effect of sound recording technology in splitting a sound from its source, preserving the sound in recorded form.¹⁰ But such a technology also splits a sound from its time: it is 'schizochronic'. In recording a sound, we preserve its flow in time. The recording represents a past sequence of time, which when played, returns to occupy the present. Any recording is a past waiting to return to the present. The replayed sound is ontologically distinct from the original, since it is a recorded version displaced in both time and space. Its return at a later time is a form of difference: the sound is marked by both the technological intervention and the displacement in time. Incorporating these markings of future difference, the sound once recorded is re-constituted: it is split across time, imbued with the potential of re-emergence in time.