...

with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

resounding australian silence | a brief history of sound(scapes)

it goes echoing | selective hearing | folding the map away

Silence—an absence.
Australia—‘the silent continent’. [1]

Silence—scientifically impossible, subjectively insufferable.

Australia—“It was a silent void at the far end of the world. In the act of clearing it, civilised
men were bringing sound and light to the solitude.” [2]

sounds:
alan lamb | wogarno (1:33, australian sound design project , 1999) | play

Like wine spreading across a tablecloth, the sound and light of European
civilisation slowly eked its way into the ‘silent’ Australian interior. The
stains that remain, however, are blood red, for this preternatural ‘silence’
is partly a euphemism: “it is easier by far to place, not Aborigines, but
[3]
silence on the far side of the frontier.” But the experience of silence
was also partly the ignorance of the pioneer. With eyes and ears attuned
[4]
only to the familiar, they were shocked by new sights and sounds. This
was a failure of sensory and intellectual assimilation—and a failure
which sought to overcome its alienation through violence against both
man and nature.
Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999)
[5] Source: Australian Sound Design Project
If this history—and genocide—begins with the dull thud of an axe ,
how are we to capture Australia’s echoes and understand their
resonances?
[6]
An attuned ear could have listened to the sounds the land emitted. But
‘sound,’ the perceived positive to silence’s negative, is so often
understood only to be the human and the ‘beautiful’. By the twentieth
century, however, an aesthetic appreciation and artistic apprehension of
the diverse sounds in the world becomes an interest entertained by
hundreds of practitioners around the world. Composers of soundscape
art draw on everyday sounds and other ‘latent’ sound environments to
[7]
create their works.

The field of soundscape art is a fertile one in Australia. It yields manifold

styles and approaches; manifold engagements with local landscapes as
well as transnational spaces. These soundscapes offer the sounds of
cities, towns and badlands; of empty drums, afternoon barbecues and
cicadas in the sun. Their provenance is outside language—or, perhaps,
better put, it is the global language of sounds, of the world’s rhythms and
tones stressed and emphasised.

As sounds taken from the world, processed and sent back out as artistic
works, these recordings bear always the load of being an ‘interpretation’;
they are framed and edited, at once contingent and controlled. They are
a kind of aural entropy—a play of sounds in a system closed off by
microphones, computers and artistic endeavour. Claims to realism do
not always acknowledge this. Such determinedly realist works erase the
human, artistic act while at the same time positing the resultant artistic
artefact as worthy of attention (a kind of immodest modesty then: ‘I
bring you an artistic work and I wash my hands of it—but do you like it?
’). Yet others put their action inside the aural frame (footsteps, the ruffle
of a coat), admitting a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the
arts; or, indeed, a thoroughly modernist underlining of artistic

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/index.html[26/08/2013 1:00:26 PM]

...with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

production.

Lawrence English and Alan Lamb, the central artists discussed here, are
respected figures in the Australian sound art scene. Their works lead us
to some of the different ways landscape and soundscape are imagined in
Australia. English’s works cross the tangled lines of flight in
experimental music: he runs a respected record label issuing local and
international releases, curates at the Brisbane Powerhouse and Judith
Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, collaborates with artists from
around the world on one-off projects—and composes intricate, distilled
field recordings in Australian and international settings. Alan Lamb, a
Scottish ex-pat, is much less prolific and more singular in his focus. He
builds large instruments which stage an interface between culture and
nature. His so-called “Faraway Wind Organ”, for instance, was a sonic
reservoir, tapped into whenever inspiration struck—and then left to hum
its own unpredictable and melancholy tune. Other projects by Lamb have
used the landscape as a kind of base for sonic experiments between wind
and wire, water and sun, wind and rock (as seen in the Wogarno
project).

It could be said that Lamb is to poetry as English is to prose: Lamb is an

impressionistic artist, concerned with a compressed but sonorous
exposition of both colonialism’s desolate remnants in the Australian
outback and the very landscapes which made those colonists turn and
run; English is interested too in the remnants of a society, but, in the
work I consider here (Ghost Towns [Room 40, 2004]), his concern is
with the ravages of the post-industrial economy on Australia’s ‘Ghost
Towns’. As such, his is at once a work infused with socio-political
specificity and a generalised sense of the (global) ‘field recording’
aesthetic. If Lamb and English point to the richness of interpretations of
space in Australian sound, it is for this reason that their differences are
stressed here.

Using these two artists as examples, the work here takes as its starting
point an observation by Ros Bandt:

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes of

listening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be in
the temporal continuum of place. By participating in the
auditory moment, the continuously changing present can
be more fully known through experience. The present
becomes the past in a moment and activates memory
thereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. What
are we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to take
time to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilised
white society. Listening requires a sharing of temporal
space; it is a communal experience very much defined by
the sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a place
to listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge as
[8]
they are articulated by sound.

Across the pages of this site I hope to elucidate this connection between
site, sound and memory by looking to the ways that those aural
experiences are framed in works of sound art. There is a suggestive
narrative of exploration—as indicated by the order of menu items above
(thus beginning with the history of soundscape as an art)—but this
journey is open to redefinition. In line with the potential of a browser-
driven narrative, important concepts are referenced and linked to other
sections when they are fundamental to the discussion.

[1]See J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian Sound
Design Project, <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,
1994, accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[2] M. Cathcart, “The Silent Continent,” in Adam Shoemaker (ed.), A Sea Change: Australian
Writing and Photography, Sydney: SOCOG, 1998, p94.
[3]

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...with ears for landscape | australian soundscapes

M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95. See also P. Carter (“Ambiguous Traces,” Australian
Sound Design Project, <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>,
June, 2001, accessed: 5 th November, 2005) who notes, “one expression of the fate that
overtook the Australian Aborigines who came into contact with the first settlers was that they
could not be misstaken for somebody else. Their silence was a direct consequence of the
impossibility of remaining deaf to them.”
[4] See P. Carter (op. cit.) who points to “the exclamation of the white settler who, on
hearing a cock crow after days bushed in the Gippsland forest, cried out, ‘Thank God, an
English voice at last!’… [Such] hearers suffer from a form of auditory agoraphobia, a loss of
environmental resonance.”
[5] M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95.

[6] As Antonia Pont writes in her interesting online project, (“Moving Listening: A Poetic
Cycle” Refractory (online),
<http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/stateofplay/articles/APont.html>, February, 2005,
accessed: 27 th October, 2005), “Listening = Hearing + Intention.”
[7] B. Truax (Acoustic Communication, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984) first
provided this simple definition.
[8] R. Bandt, “Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, An Audible Polyphony,”
Australian Sound Design Project,
<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/NationPaper.html>, June, 2001a,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/index.html[26/08/2013 1:00:26 PM]

Untitled Document

Silence—an absence.
Australia—‘the silent continent’. [1]

Silence—scientifically impossible, subjectively insufferable.

Australia—“It was a silent void at the far end of the world. In the act of clearing it, civilised
men were bringing sound and light to the solitude.” [2]

sounds:
alan lamb | wogarno (1:33, australian sound design project , 1999) | play

Like wine spreading across a tablecloth, the sound and light of European
civilisation slowly eked its way into the ‘silent’ Australian interior. The
stains that remain, however, are blood red, for this preternatural ‘silence’
is partly a euphemism: “it is easier by far to place, not Aborigines, but
[3]
silence on the far side of the frontier.” But the experience of silence
was also partly the ignorance of the pioneer. With eyes and ears attuned
[4]
only to the familiar, they were shocked by new sights and sounds. This
was a failure of sensory and intellectual assimilation—and a failure
which sought to overcome its alienation through violence against both
man and nature.
Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999)
[5] Source: Australian Sound Design Project
If this history—and genocide—begins with the dull thud of an axe ,
how are we to capture Australia’s echoes and understand their
resonances?
[6]
An attuned ear could have listened to the sounds the land emitted. But
‘sound,’ the perceived positive to silence’s negative, is so often
understood only to be the human and the ‘beautiful’. By the twentieth
century, however, an aesthetic appreciation and artistic apprehension of
the diverse sounds in the world becomes an interest entertained by
hundreds of practitioners around the world. Composers of soundscape
art draw on everyday sounds and other ‘latent’ sound environments to
[7]
create their works.

The field of soundscape art is a fertile one in Australia. It yields manifold

styles and approaches; manifold engagements with local landscapes as
well as transnational spaces. These soundscapes offer the sounds of
cities, towns and badlands; of empty drums, afternoon barbecues and
cicadas in the sun. Their provenance is outside language—or, perhaps,
better put, it is the global language of sounds, of the world’s rhythms and
tones stressed and emphasised.

As sounds taken from the world, processed and sent back out as artistic
works, these recordings bear always the load of being an ‘interpretation’;
they are framed and edited, at once contingent and controlled. They are
a kind of aural entropy—a play of sounds in a system closed off by
microphones, computers and artistic endeavour. Claims to realism do
not always acknowledge this. Such determinedly realist works erase the
human, artistic act while at the same time positing the resultant artistic
artefact as worthy of attention (a kind of immodest modesty then: ‘I
bring you an artistic work and I wash my hands of it—but do you like it?
’). Yet others put their action inside the aural frame (footsteps, the ruffle
of a coat), admitting a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the
arts; or, indeed, a thoroughly modernist underlining of artistic
production.

Lawrence English and Alan Lamb, the central artists discussed here, are
respected figures in the Australian sound art scene. Their works lead us
to some of the different ways landscape and soundscape are imagined in
Australia. English’s works cross the tangled lines of flight in
experimental music: he runs a respected record label issuing local and
international releases, curates at the Brisbane Powerhouse and Judith
Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, collaborates with artists from

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/textbody.html[26/08/2013 1:00:27 PM]

Untitled Document

around the world on one-off projects—and composes intricate, distilled

field recordings in Australian and international settings. Alan Lamb, a
Scottish ex-pat, is much less prolific and more singular in his focus. He
builds large instruments which stage an interface between culture and
nature. His so-called “Faraway Wind Organ”, for instance, was a sonic
reservoir, tapped into whenever inspiration struck—and then left to hum
its own unpredictable and melancholy tune. Other projects by Lamb have
used the landscape as a kind of base for sonic experiments between wind
and wire, water and sun, wind and rock (as seen in the Wogarno
project).

It could be said that Lamb is to poetry as English is to prose: Lamb is an

impressionistic artist, concerned with a compressed but sonorous
exposition of both colonialism’s desolate remnants in the Australian
outback and the very landscapes which made those colonists turn and
run; English is interested too in the remnants of a society, but, in the
work I consider here (Ghost Towns [Room 40, 2004]), his concern is
with the ravages of the post-industrial economy on Australia’s ‘Ghost
Towns’. As such, his is at once a work infused with socio-political
specificity and a generalised sense of the (global) ‘field recording’
aesthetic. If Lamb and English point to the richness of interpretations of
space in Australian sound, it is for this reason that their differences are
stressed here.

Using these two artists as examples, the work here takes as its starting
point an observation by Ros Bandt:

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes of

listening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be in
the temporal continuum of place. By participating in the
auditory moment, the continuously changing present can
be more fully known through experience. The present
becomes the past in a moment and activates memory
thereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. What
are we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to take
time to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilised
white society. Listening requires a sharing of temporal
space; it is a communal experience very much defined by
the sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a place
to listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge as
[8]
they are articulated by sound.

Across the pages of this site I hope to elucidate this connection between
site, sound and memory by looking to the ways that those aural
experiences are framed in works of sound art. There is a suggestive
narrative of exploration—as indicated by the order of menu items above
(thus beginning with the history of soundscape as an art)—but this
journey is open to redefinition. In line with the potential of a browser-
driven narrative, important concepts are referenced and linked to other
sections when they are fundamental to the discussion.

[1]See J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian Sound
Design Project, <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,
1994, accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[2] M. Cathcart, “The Silent Continent,” in Adam Shoemaker (ed.), A Sea Change: Australian
Writing and Photography, Sydney: SOCOG, 1998, p94.
[3] M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95. See also P. Carter (“Ambiguous Traces,” Australian
Sound Design Project, <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>,
June, 2001, accessed: 5 th November, 2005) who notes, “one expression of the fate that
overtook the Australian Aborigines who came into contact with the first settlers was that they
could not be misstaken for somebody else. Their silence was a direct consequence of the
impossibility of remaining deaf to them.”
[4] See P. Carter (op. cit.) who points to “the exclamation of the white settler who, on
hearing a cock crow after days bushed in the Gippsland forest, cried out, ‘Thank God, an
English voice at last!’… [Such] hearers suffer from a form of auditory agoraphobia, a loss of
environmental resonance.”
[5] M. Cathcart, op. cit., 1998, p95.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/textbody.html[26/08/2013 1:00:27 PM]

Untitled Document

[6] As Antonia Pont writes in her interesting online project, (“Moving Listening: A Poetic
Cycle” Refractory (online),
<http://www.refractory.unimelb.edu.au/stateofplay/articles/APont.html>, February, 2005,
accessed: 27 th October, 2005), “Listening = Hearing + Intention.”
[7] B. Truax (Acoustic Communication, New Jersey: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1984) first
provided this simple definition.
[8] R. Bandt, “Hearing Australian Identity: Sites as Acoustic Spaces, An Audible Polyphony,”
Australian Sound Design Project,
<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/NationPaper/NationPaper.html>, June, 2001a,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005.

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/textbody.html[26/08/2013 1:00:27 PM]

 “Music is always in the making, groping its way through some frail and mysterious passage -
and a very strange one it is - between nature and culture.”
—Pierre Schaeffer [1]  
sounds:
pierre schaeffer | etude aux chemins de fer (2:52, ohm, 2000 [1948]) | play
luc ferarri | presque rien no. 1 c (4:42, presque rien , 1998 [1970]) | play

Pierre Schaeffer and R. Murrary Schafer—two men with similar names

are the father figures of sound art. Of course, to say this is to provide a
history all too neat, to provide a history that pushes to the boundaries
the flirtations and frolickings in this field by earlier practitioners—and to
entirely eclipse the technicians who invented the recording techniques so
[2]
indispensable to the practice. What does it mean, then, to reduce a
complex history to these two figures; to sideline John Cage and Luc
Ferarri, Luigi Russolo and Pierre Henry? Schaeffer and Schafer were
perhaps the first two practitioners and writers to articulate something
like a program and motivation for an aesthetic and ethical investigation
of the world as sound, and to harness new recording technology as a tool
in their respective projects. This pair did not work together and
suggested quite different engagements with the world, but both imagined
the world as a glory box of sounds.

Schafer is the progenitor of the ecological, nominally ‘scientific’ side of

soundscape art. His 1977 book, The Tuning of the World, is still
Pierre Schaeffer
referenced regularly today. In it, Schafer argues that, most Source: "Archives GRM; INA 30 Years"
fundamentally: “acoustic ecology is… the study of sounds in relationship
to life and society. This cannot be accomplished by remaining in the
laboratory. It can only be accomplished by considering on location the
[3]
effects of the acoustic environment on the creatures living in it.” As
Wrightson notes, Schafer was pragmatic in his approach to awakening a
kind of ‘aural awareness’ in the general public: “Schafer’s response to the
problem [of noise pollution] was to develop a range of ‘ear cleaning’
exercises including ‘soundwalks,’ a walking meditation where the object
[4]
is to maintain a high level of sonic awareness.” Schafer wrote that the
acoustic explorer “must thoroughly understand the environment [s]he is
tackling; [s]he must have training in acoustics, psychology, sociology,
[5]
music, and a great deal more besides, as the occasion demands.”
Schafer gave force to this holistic, ecological approach by deploying the
term “soundscape” in quite a specific way—the soundscape imagines the
R. Murrary Schafer
entirety of sound in a place as a scene to be investigated down to its Source: "A True Renaissance Man"
minute detail, and for analysis to be done always with a particular stress
[6]
on sound's impact for human subjects. Schafer was motivated by what
he perceived to be the rapid shift from landscapes with ‘natural’ or “hi-fi”
soundscapes (“in which discrete sounds can be heard clearly because of
the low ambient noise level”) to those of ‘industrial’ or “lo-fi” sounds (in
which “individual acoustic signals are obscured in an overdense
[7]
population of sounds”). Put crudely, this is a refiguring of the
urban/rural dichotomy—familiar since at least the time of Virgil’s
pastoral poetry—with a valorisation of the rural. (See Italian futurist
Luigi Russolo’s “Art of Noises” essay for the reverse of this valorisation.)
But it, nevertheless, emerges from a legitimate concern about urban
noise pollution. Schafer was instrumental in establishing the World
Soundscape Project (WSP) and in drawing together interested academics
and practitioners at the Simon Fraser University (SFU) in Canada. These Luc Ferrari
two groups—virtually interchangeable—lent strength to a burgeoning Source: "Archives GRM; INA 30 Years"
[8]
acoustic ecology movement.

Pierre Schaeffer’s project was perhaps more musically formalist, yet

equally revolutionary in its break from classical instrumentation.
Schaeffer is widely known as the figurehead of the ‘musique concrete’
style of musical composition. This is a style that understood audio tape
as a kind of instrument to be stretched, cut and spliced. These
experiments utilised recordings of non-musical, ‘concrete’ objects. Jose
Iges provides a neat summary Schaeffer’s genesis:

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 Starting in 1948, in the studios of ORTF, now Radio
France, this musician and researcher set out to
systematise, for compositional purposes, concrete sounds,
which to some extent amount to the sounds on which
soundscape authors have drawn. However, one of
Schaeffer's particular obsessions was to create a "solfa of
sound objects" in his Traité des objets musicaux, to
recognise these objects as realities which could be
abstracted beyond the "sound-producing body" which
[9]
generated them.

As this suggests, the ‘sound’ is both a currency of musical and concrete

value for Schaeffer. He wrote that,

Any sound phenomenon can be taken[,] like the words of a

language[,] for its relative meaning or its actual substance.
In that its meaning predominates, and this is what we play
with, it is literature and not music. But how can we forget
its meaning, isolate it from the sound phenomenon? This
requires two prior operations: Distinguishing an element
(listening to it in itself, for its texture, its material, its
colour). Repeating it. Repeat the same sound fragment
[10]
twice: the event is replaced by music.

He gives the example of a train—the recorded sound of its travelling

along tracks may be repeated for some time without any change in its
pattern, and such an experience, he suggests, “makes us forget that we
[11]
are dealing with a train.”

The fundamental distinction between these men’s perceptions of sound

is one of context. For Pierre Schaeffer, l’objet sonore (‘the sonorous
object’) is the most interesting sound; that is, the sound shorn of context
—a single sound, alone and autonomous. As Brian Kane notes,
Schaeffer’s observations emerge from a tradition aligned with the
phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, for it reduces sound to
the experience of hearing: “The sonorous object is only attained when
[12]
sound no longer functions as a medium for signification.” But for
Schafer this is conceptually unappealing and theoretically impossible. As
Proy summarises the Schafer view, “[Schaferian] soundscapes ought not
to be reduced to merely quantitative acoustic valuation. Soundscape
[13]
research analyses the interaction of sounds in their contexts.” Yet
Schafer also holds in mind the notion that

most sounds of the environment are produced by known

objects and one of the most useful ways of cataloguing
them is according to their referential aspects. But the
system used to organise such a vast number of
designations will be arbitrary, for no sound has an
objective meaning, and the observer will have specific
[14]
cultural attitudes towards the subject.

This, as Proy points out, is similar to the internally-referential semiotics

[15]
and linguistics of Ferdinand de Saussure.

I engage with the practical meaning of these debates for listeners more
in other sections of the site; it is perhaps enough to note here the split in
views and their initial effect of producing two different understandings of
sound art: one in which context yields meaning, the other in which
autonomous sounds were to be uncoupled from their concrete object of
[16]
origin.

The rigid distinctions of these two ‘families’ perhaps remain less visible
today. Nevertheless, it seems Schaeffer’s abstraction has been absorbed
by the Schaferians, but less flow has occurred in the other direction. As
Barry Truax, a Schafer colleague and member of SFU and WSP, writes

http://pandora.nla.gov.au/pan/13231/20070203-0000/asc.uq.edu.au/crossings/11_2/ben_gook/briefhistory.html[26/08/2013 1:00:29 PM]

 the soundscape composition, as pioneered at Simon Fraser
University since the early 1970s, has evolved rapidly to
explore a full range of approaches from the ‘found sound’
representation of acoustic environments through to the
incorporation of highly abstracted sonic transformations.
The structural approaches similarly range from being
analogues of real-world experience, such as listening from
a fixed spatial perspective or moving through a connected
series of acoustic spaces, to those that mirror both
nonlinear mental experiences of memory recall, dreams,
and free association, as well as artificial sonic constructs
[17]
made familiar and possible by modern ‘schizophonic’
[18]
audio techniques of sonic layering and embedding.

It is an indicator of the break down in boundaries that Truax notes the

presence of ‘schizophonic’ compositions in the SFU-Schaferian field, for
‘schizophonic’ techniques are aligned with the decontextualised concrete
of Schaeffer. Yet one sees some resistance to this inclusion with Traux’s
designation of this technique as “artificial”—a slightly negative label he
also applies to “montage” works elsewhere in the essay. As such remarks
make us aware, the vector of the Schaferian sound artists remains
directed towards the original goal of ecology; of aural awareness and a
concomitant concern with noise pollution: it aspires to convey a kind of
locatable, real—not ‘artificial’—soundscape with political and social
implications.

[1] Quoted in J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4,
CEC: Canada, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000,
date accessed: 3 rd October, 2005.

[2] As H. Westerkamp has written, “to date, there have been few attempts to define
soundscape composition as a genre; … to highlight its potential in enhancing listening
awareness” (“Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,” Soundscapes.nl
(online), <http://www.omroep.nl/nps/radio/supplement/99/soundscapes/westerkamp.html>,
1999, accessed: 5 th November, 2005). While Westerkamp was writing some years ago—and
the range of writing seems to have expanded since that time—what writing there has been, it
seems, has tended towards an early orthodoxy. If I propagate that orthodoxy here, I do so
merely because I lack the resources and space to truly challenge this. Nevertheless, it seems
that Francisco Lopez’s articles, referenced throughout this site, do offer something like an
articulate and impassioned dissenting voice in this field.

[3] R. M. Schafer, The Tuning of the World, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977, p205.

[4] K. Wrightson, “An Introduction to Acoustic Ecology,” eContact! (online), 5.3, CEC:
Canada, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/NAISA/introduction.html>, 2002, date accessed:
3 rd October, 2005.

[5] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p206.

[6] See, for instance, R. M. Schafer’s earlier book The New Soundscape, Toronto: Berandol
Music, 1969. But also R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977.

[7] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p43.

[8] See H. Westerkamp, “Linking Soundscape and Acoustic Ecology,” Organised Sound, 7.1,
2002, pp51-56, for a memoir of one of the central figures in this group. For a more objective
account, see J. Iges, op. cit.

[9] J. Iges, op. cit.

[10] Schaeffer quoted in J. Iges, op. cit.

[11] Schaeffer quoted in J. Iges, op. cit.

[12] B. Kane, “L’Objet Sonore Maintenant: Reflections on the Philosophical Origins of

Musique Concrète,” conference paper, Spark 2005: Festival of Electronic Music and Art,
University of Minnesota, available online:
<http://spark.cla.umn.edu/archive2005/SPro_sec3.pdf>, 2005, p58.

[13] G. Proy, “Sound and Sign,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p17.

[14] R. M. Schafer, op. cit., 1977, p137.

[15] G. Proy, op. cit., p18.

[16] While it is rhetorically appealing to suggest a radical split in these views—and perhaps
some kind of narrativised transatlantic battle—most accounts suggest that the distinction was
one of methodology and one maintained through fairly amiable relations. It is perhaps
enough to note here that Schaeffer is mentioned several times in Schafer’s book, and always
with some reverence. See, for instance, R. M. Schafer, (op. cit., 1977), p111, p129 & p134.

[17] R.M. Schafer (op. cit., 1977, pp90-91) defines ‘schizophonia’ as “the split between an

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 original sound and its electroacoustical transmission or reproduction. It is another twentieth-
century development.” This is Benjaminian argument about the status of the ‘original sound’
and the mechanical/technological reproduction of it on disc, tape or computer. But for
Schafer, this shift was undoubtedly a negative one: “it creates a synthetic soundscape in
which natural sounds are becoming increasingly unnatural while machine-made substitutes
are providing the operative signals directing modern life.” (ibid)

[18] B. Traux, “Genres and Techniques of Soundscape Composition as Developed at Simon

Fraser University,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p12

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 “By the typical bushman [I mean] the Bush-grown, Bush-rooted product, the nomad tethered
in the limits of the cattle-track, the shepherd stagnant among out-station sheep, or the man
hidden all his days among the gullies and the ranges, in a world bounded on the one side by
the remote township, and on the other by the great Australian silence.”
—A. G. Stephens [1]

sounds:
lawrence english | ghost towns (18:18, ghost towns, 2004) | play

If Stephens provides one account of the Australian landscape and its

inhabitants, artist David Keenan provides another in which Stephens’
version is overwritten; the pioneer-martyr  is replaced by human
smallness and folly.

Ghost Towns installation image

Source: Lawrence English

David Keenan, West, oil on linen, 82 x 122cm, 1992.

Source: "Savill Galleries - Landscapes," no date.

In Keenan’s West, a tiny community sits on the crest of a hill. Filling the
rest of the canvas are a tapestry of rusted hills, inky valleys and rising
mountains. Roads snake through this landscape, following no discernible
logic other than the need to mark out, like wild animals, a set of co- Kidston, Ravenswood, Queensland
ordinates for human space. Another settlement is perched further back Source: B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, p65.
and barely visible. It’s sited on the border zone of the setting’s
vertiginous mountain backdrop. The landscape is massive, uneven,
unsettled—almost monumental. The human efforts are mocked through
scale—they are at once pitiful (roads like the aimless desk etchings of
bored schoolkids) and melancholic (so much isolation): “White Man in
Australia was truly alone. Having silenced nature in his old history, and
slaughtered the natives in his new history, the cultural subjectivity of the
White Man was situated in a place he did not know, with no-one to talk
[2]
to but himself.”

Nevertheless, the logic of settlement, for all its seemingly illogical

perversity in West, is one figured around resources. Whether wealth-
Lawrence English
bringing (seen in mining and other attempts to harness natural Source: Liquid Architecture
resources) or life-giving (water and food, most fundamentally), the logics
of settlement are brittle in the face of wider contingencies. The arrival of
drought, the competition of other nearby towns, the depletion of natural
resources and the buffeting winds of global capital—as given to carrying
one along on the winds of success as blowing one backwards—are but a
few of the forces in operation for the town and city embedded in natural,
state and international flows. With their oxidised lace-iron balconies and
corrugated-iron sheds, the ghost towns which dot the Australian
landscape are an index of this boom and bust. Their empty and desolate
streetscapes represent, in the terms of Stephens, the encroaching of the
silence into the township.

But these ghost towns figure also in a broader context. They figure, for
instance, as an example of the “destructiveness” Paul Carter sees in the

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 planet’s diminishing bio and cultural diversity. The awareness of this
destruction, for Carter, removes the possibility of an autonomous
soundscape art:

[T]he global character of this destructiveness, and the late

capitalistic systems of human and environmental
exploitation that drive it, prevents us from considering
acoustic ecology apart from the larger multi-sensory and
polyvalent life-world within which vocalisation, music-
making, hearing and listening occur. A definition of
auditory knowledge that insulates it from the occasions of
sound making and marking reproduces the shortcomings
[3]
of the 'visualist' fallacy.

In line with this, sound artist Lawrence English has noted in an interview Graveyard, Mount Milligan, North Queensland.
Source: B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, p81.
that before embarking on his Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) project, he
researched the phenomenon through the writings of Barry McGowan
[4]
and Colin Hooper. English’s CD release and the gallery installation—
which adds photography to the soundscape—both come with minimal
recognition of this admirable effort to situate the towns of his recordings
in a context at once global and local. Despite remaining a trace element
rather than an overt statement, the project is imbued with a sense of
thoughtfulness that functions without deadening any immediate affective
response.

The piece starts out quietly and follows a narrative of exploration: there
are birds, the sounds of walking, what sounds like a rattlesnake, the low,
eerie rumble of wind, insects, flies. Later, English starts thumping what
sounds like a disused oil drum before the familiar, deafening shriek of
[5]
cicadas overwhelms all else in the recording. The piece is narrativised
—in the sense that it follows a logic of peripatetic exploration—but is
open in its form; selective and astute but without dictation. Following
Carter, we can see that the “sound knowledge” in English’s work “is anti-
perspectival, immersive, symbolic but non-imaginal, looped (in the
feedback between listening and speaking) and eventful. These qualities
are performative. They represent time and space as the doubled history
[6]
and geography of encounters.”   This is particularly fitting for ghost
towns, for they are melancholy spaces, locatable in a multiplicity of
narratives (Indigenous, prospecting, settler, post-industrial, nostalgic).
As McCartney writes, “soundscape composers can act as interpreters of
[7]
the various languages of places” —for English, this process began with
research, but this skeleton gained flesh as he encountered the space.

Indeed, English’s Ghost Towns reactivates these ruined towns in time

and space. He engages a kind of nostalgia and reverie, but always
situates this in dialogue with other histories which circulate outside of
such a frame: “The essence of soundscape composition is the artistic,
sonic transmission of meanings about place, time, environment and
[8]
listening perception.” As such, Ghost Towns is not the site of an
ossifying nostalgia (identified by Massey as the ruse of backward
[9]
nationalism ); it is a work aware of the various groups and moments
that have inhabited the spaces it wanders through. English’s piece evokes

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 a specific scene that, paradoxically, remains generalisable across the
Australian landscape. As Blainey writes, “in every region [of Australia]
travellers using even the main roads come across the remains of these
[10]
dead or fast-asleep towns.”

English says he “was deeply aware of the social histories that surround
[11]
the towns themselves.” As a result of this, he went to areas around
Queensland and made field recordings in places where he “became
fascinated with this idea of natural reclamation of land once inhabited by
[12]
settlers.” In this interest, English mirrors Tony Birch’s concern in his
recent essay, “‘Death is Forgotten in Victory’: Colonial Landscapes and
[13]
Narratives of Emptiness.” In this essay, Birch visits Steiglitz, a
Victorian ghost town. Any surface similarity between the works is
deepened by a similar use of the cemetery as the locus of rumination.
English remarks that “in some of the graveyards for instance we were
[14]
able to find the resting places of a few of the original settlers.” In
Birch’s essay, the Steiglitz graveyard is a site for profound meditation on
the meaning of these spaces: “For me, the visit to the cemeteries at
Steiglitz transferred the life and death of an otherwise ‘pioneer object’ of
[15]
the past into both a real and metaphysical present.”

This transfer of life and death, past and present is the aim of the
soundscape art that English practices in his Ghost Towns work. In the
most rudimentary way, an encounter with this work is an encounter with
the past ‘present’ of its recording (the ‘schizophonia’ of Schafer discussed
elsewhere). But in a deeper way, English’s walk around the spaces of
ghost towns is also a kind of conversation between historical past and
present, between artist and inhabitant, between wind and iron, between
cicada and microphone. In English’s editing of the piece, these
conversations are amorphous and shapeshifting—one is prioritised then
another. The work is a whole to be experienced as such; time and
duration—that is to say, memory—is fundamental to its function as an
exploration of space. Any soundscape is always an unfolding experience,
evocative in the way it stretches over time; as a kind of virtual,
phenomenological experience it takes artists time to ‘image’ a sense of
space.

There are several models used to understand the way listeners conjure
an image of the soundscape space. One of these is acousmatics, a theory
put forward by Pierre Schaeffer and elucidated further by fellow French
[16]
writer François Bayle. Acousmatics describes the process of listening
to a sound without seeing its source (following the ‘akousmatikoi’ model
of Pythagoras’ students—who watched their lecturer orate from behind a
[17]
screen ):

One who has not experienced in the dark the sensation of

hearing points of infinite distance, trajectories and waves,
sudden whispers, so near, moving sound matter, in relief
and in colour, cannot imagine the invisible spectacle for
the ears. Imagination gives wings to intangible sound.
Acousmatic art is the art of mental representations
[18]
triggered by sound.

Bayle added nuance to this model by positing two different types of

[19]
listening: ‘perception allocentrique’ and the ‘perception egocentrique’.
In the ‘allocentrique’ mode, there is a radical understanding of every
sound as important, there is no centre; in the ‘egocentrique’ mode, our
listening determines the focus—“we decide, we focus, we put together
[20]
everything that happens in the room.” Another model Schaeffer
proposed was that of the “acoustic screen” (e’cran sonore): “While
listening to sound projection, for instance to radio, the listener
him/herself is the acoustic screen on which sound images are being
projected. We listen to sound images created by a composer or a radio
[21]
producer and form our own personal sound images.”

Perhaps the neatest summary of the commonality in these two models is

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 to suggest that the listener creates his or her own virtual space through
imagination, at once drawing on life-experience through memory and
[22]
the sonic materials provided by the artist. This gives the works a
sense of narrative and transience that would superficially seem difficult
to achieve without some kind of voice-over or clearly signposted
narration. Often, this narrative is predicated on the notion that we’re at
[23]
rest while the world moves around us. That is, as static listeners, we
submit to the map of a journey inked by the soundscape artist but then
ourselves provide the colour for their outlines: “listening to
soundscapes…touches our personal repertoire of listening. Messages are
decoded in relation to our own sound experiences. Because sounds are
[24]
linked to memorised experiences, internal images arise.”

Radiating out from the ghost towns of Brisbane, then, are a range of
experiences which listeners to Lawrence English’s piece may be drawing
on: the towns themselves, other rural towns, outback experiences,
summer days in a creaking back shed, a barbeque in a park, an American
ghost town. The options are potentially infinite, but this is not to reduce
the soundscape of Ghost Towns to mere cipher. Ghost Towns engages
with a specific Australian space at a time, as recognised by Blainey and
McGowan, when once prosperous towns are withering. But this is only
one narrative to be picked from the tapestry English provides; Ghost
Towns speaks with different voices and is heard in manifold ways.

[1] A.G. Stephens quoted in J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic
Space,” Australian Sound Design Project,
<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May, 1994, accessed:
5 th November, 2005.
[2] J. Belfrage, op. cit.

[3] P. Carter, “Ambiguous Traces,” Australian Sound Design Project,

<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>, June, 2001,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[4] B. B. Fish, “Field of Dreams,” Cyclic Defrost, 10, January 2005, magazine interview with
Lawrence English, p16 (also available online: http://www.cyclicdefrost.com/article.php?
article=762).  See, particularly, B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, South Melbourne:
Thomas C. Lothian, 2002.
[5] See A. McCartney, (“Alien Intimacies: Hearing Science Fiction Narratives in Hildegard
Westerkamp’s Cricket Voice (or ‘I Don’t Like the Country, the Crickets Make Me Nervous’),”
Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002a, pp45-49) for an intriguing comparative account of the
cricket’s/cicada’s function in different areas of sound design. F. Lopez (“Environmental Sound
Matter,” <http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html>, April, 1998, accessed: 4 th November,
2005) also notes that cricket/cicada is the ultimate acousmatic species—it is always heard,
but rarely seen.
[6] P. Carter, op. cit.

[7] A. McCartney, “Circumscribed Journeys Through Soundscape Composition,” Organised

Sound, 7.1, 2002b, p1.
[8] H. Westerkamp, “Soundscape Composition: Linking Inner and Outer Worlds,”
Soundscapes.nl (online),
<http://www.omroep.nl/nps/radio/supplement/99/soundscapes/westerkamp.html>, 1999,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[9] D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, pp4-5.

[10] G. Blainey, “Foreword,” in B. McGowan, Australian Ghost Towns, South Melbourne:

Thomas C. Lothian, 2002, p.vi.
[11] B. B. Fish, op. cit., p16.

[12] Ibid.

[13] T. Birch, “‘Death is Forgotten in Victory’: Colonial Landscapes and Narratives of

Emptiness,” in Jane Lydon (ed.), Object Lessons: Archaeology and Heritage in Australia,
Kew: Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2005, forthcoming.
[14] B. B. Fish, op. cit., p16.

[15] T. Birch, op. cit., 2005, np.

[16] F. Bayle, Musique acousmatique – propositions . . . positions, Bibliotheque de recherche

musicale INA-GRM, Paris: Editions Buchet/Chastel, 1993. Cited in both G. Proy, “Sound and
Sign,” Organised Sound, 7.1, 2002, p17 & F. Dhomont, “Acousmatic Update,” Sonic Arts
Network (online),
<http://www.sonicartsnetwork.org/ARTICLES/ARTICLE1996DHOMONT.html>, date accessed:
6 th November, 2005. Article originally published in SAN Journal of Electroacoustic Music, 9,
1996.

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 [17] C. Cox, “Abstract Concrete: Francisco Lopez and the Ontology of Sound,” Cabinet
(online), 2, Spring 2001, <http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/abstractconcrete.php>,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005. As part of his project, Francisco Lopez requests that his
audience wear blindfolds when attending his performances.
[18] F. Dhomont, op. cit.

[19] G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

[20] G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

[21] G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

[22] See T. Wishart, “Sound Symbols and Landscapes,” The Language of Electroacoustic
Music, edited by Simon Emmerson, London: Macmillan, 1986, pp41-60 for an account
similar to this ‘combination’ model.
[23] A stunning example of this kind of field recording is American artist Keith Fullerton
Whitman’s Dartmouth Street Underpass (Locust Music, 2003). This is largely what its title
says—a recording of a train underpass. A microphone was set-up and the space was
recorded to be morphed into a twenty minute piece that is both universal and specific.
Whitman’s piece is at once about a particular time and place (in Boston), but could also be
almost any city around the Western world.
[24] G. Proy, op. cit., p17.

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 sounds:
alan lamb | night passage (24:51, night passage , 1998) | play
alan lamb | last anzac (12:55, night passage , 1998) | play
 
alan lamb | fragment of the outback (10:36, motion: movement in australian sound, 2003) | play
francisco lopez | addy en el país de las frutas (excerpt, 3:08, addy en el país de las frutas, 2003) |
play

In the same way visual representations (photography, etchings, a canvas,

cinematography) can never ‘contain’ the entirety of a space, an audio
representation is always limited in its ability to depict a particular
landscape—something always spills over the borders. Both visual and
audio art are, then, always a kind of interpretive framing of a given
geographic area; they always work to emphasise and de-emphasise
particular elements of place. John Berger points this out in his seminal
1972 book, Ways of Seeing: “Every image embodies a way of seeing…
Every time we look at a photograph, we are aware, however slightly, of
the photographer selecting that sight from an infinity of other possible
[1]
sights.” Many soundscape artists seem aware of this as both an
analogous and specific problem within their field. How these artists
proceed to acknowledge or disavow the boundaries of their work is a
fascinating element of in their creations—and one which has noticeable
effects on the works produced.

Different artistic methods and different approaches to ‘imaging’ space

are implicit commentaries on what an artist values and what they
devalue. Iges calls this a “compositional attitude” and it mediates the
[2]
space between the reality of a landscape and its representation.
Francisco Lopez, a Spanish sound artist and salient writer on debates
within sound art,  writes of his utter dissatisfaction with the Schaferian
paradigm—and of his utter love for the Schaefferian objet sonore, as well
[3]
his conception of ‘absolute music’ and a striving for the ineffable. This Alan Lamb's Wogarno Wire Installation (1999)
is one instance of an artistic preference—in this case a heavily modernist Source: Australian Sound Design Project
one—which reveals a series of interests and assumptions borne out in
Lopez’s dense and often heavily abstracted work.

The Western Australian sound artist Alan Lamb also provides an

interesting example of an obtuse soundscape art that rejects any obvious
sense of ‘realism’. Working with the sounds produced at the interface of
culture and nature, Lamb presents an intriguing interpretation of space
and the process of field recording. His interest is in capturing the sound
of wires, a project he began with the “Faraway Wind Organ” in 1976 (but
which he retraces to the acts of his Aunt, who, when looking after Alan as
a boy, would put her ear to telephone poles to "hear the sound the world
[4]
made" ). Along a half-mile tract of land in Western Australia, there
were a series of disused power and telephone lines. Lamb conceived of Francisco Lopez
Source: Alien8 Recordings
the wires on this property as one massive instrument—the “Faraway
Wind Organ.” As Bandt writes, such wires “are sound sculptures in their
own right, giant wind harps sounding according to their environmental
conditions,” and represent a form of sound art with a “huge history”
[5]
locally. The sounds captured by Lamb recall a droning guitar, an
[6]
experimental string quartet or choir rather than a length of telegraph
wire; there’s an impressionistic barrenness to the sound which recalls
the type of wide-open area that Lamb uses to record these pieces. In this
sense Lambs work is a kind of aural poeticism in contrast to the ‘realist’
approach of the Schaferian acoustic ecologists.

Lamb’s wire pieces restage outside language the encounter between

Australian land and pioneer culture (as figured in the telegraph). This
‘silencing’ of language has the effect of democratising the exchange,
removing symbolic violence and power relations embedded in the
original exchanges or encounters between European settlers, Indigenous
people and the land: “Beloved and known by the indigenous peoples for
so long, the land's identity and subjectivity was critically altered [by
European settlement]. It was occupied by invading forces who could not

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 understand it. Their knowledge practices manifested a highly selective
[7]
epistemic deafness”. Carter notes that this European ‘deafness’ was
not so much wilful ignorance as an indicator of Europe’s infatuation with
the rationalism of the industrial revolution—this historical moment had
“destroyed the old European knowledge-practices” that understood
[8]
“nature as a living, speaking, listening subject.” If Lamb’s work
attempts to reconnect with this ‘old’ set of knowledge-practices, it does
not overwrite Indigenous history in Australia. While Lamb does not
make any overt display within the works of an engagement with
Indigenous history, he declares that

I place great importance on researching [A]boriginal

significance of the site. In one case (Wogarno Station,
mid[-]west outback, W[estern] A[ustralia]), I believe the
site used to have sacred importance to the [A]borigines
before the clearances of the mid 20th century. Now
‘abandoned’ I nevertheless used the site with the greatest
possible sensitivity so that the installation could sound yet
be almost invisible and interfere minimally with the land….
In all sites the installation has to be sympathetic
[9]
aesthetically and spiritually.

Like the historical research of Lawrence English, an awareness of the

landscape as a kind of palimpsest informs Lamb’s wire works; it is a
consciousness awake to a “view of the spatial…as an ever-shifting social
[10]
geometry of power and signification.” By moving toward a sound art
which ‘records’ the land through the rumbles, scrapes and hums of its
wire appendages, Lamb seems at times to offer an aural narrative of
violence and desolation. Perhaps we can hear in Lamb, then, a land and
country in a constant state of Becoming—the violence of regeneration.
“Lamb embraces vast and isolated spaces in his work,” Bandt notes, “a
system he relates to coherent biological patterns such as those involved
in the development of the embryo and in the function of the human
[11]
brain.”

In such thickly symbolic but also deeply beautiful music, Lamb avoids
the “illusion of place” Lopez notes as pervading literal “nature
[12]
music.” There is an unmistakeable negative charge to Lopez’s
discussion of ‘acoustic ecology’ recording practices, but this is not
without basis. Acoustic ecology or ‘bioacoustician’ practices seem to
efface the technology intrinsic to their acts of representation, offering up
a purported realism that ‘images’ spaces unproblematically. One need
only return to Berger’s earlier point about visual art to see the general
fallacy of this—and Lopez does not stop short on pointing out the
particular fallacy of the ‘bioacousticians’:

Now that we have digital recording technology (with all its

concomitant sound quality improvements) we can realize
more straightforwardly that the microphones are—they
always have been—our basic interfaces in our attempt at
apprehending the sonic world around us, and also that
they are non-neutral interfaces. Different microphones
‘hear’ so differently that they can be considered as a first
transformational step with more dramatic consequences
than, for example, a further re-equalization of the
recordings in the studio. Even [though] we don't subtract
or add anything[,] we cannot avoid having a version of
[3]
what we consider as reality.

Indeed, if microphones are revealed as biased forms of technology (in

both a technical and rhetorical sense), the purported veil of ‘realism’ is
lifted. Of course, one may protest that ‘realism’ is never so absolutist in
its conception as to purportedly bring ‘reality’ to the listener through a
recording, but it is the pretence of natural, untempered ‘reportage’ which
Lopez is complicating. As he points out, perhaps a more apt label for

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 such ‘realistic’ works would be “hyper-realism”—for it is a reality free of
blemishes and unachievable within the spaces they allege to
[14]
represent. A related concern of many ‘realist’ works is the appearance
of an unedited—again, untempered—recording of nature-as-it-is. Yet, as
Lopez asks rhetorically: “If we are pursuing naturalness in our sound
[15]
work, what kind of editing is more ‘real'?” To posit an unedited whole
—which seems practically unattainable (when do you stop the recording?
)—is to be deaf to the creativity afforded by cutting, juxtaposition and
splicing; in short, by the techniques so frequently exploited in film
[16]
editing.

All of this does not severe a connection between space and soundscape
recording. But it expresses scepticism about some of the claims for
‘realism’ inherent in both the statements of artists and theoreticians;
claims which attempt to elide the artist-as-mediator. Indeed, works such
Lamb’s wire music pieces—and Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) of
English—are an artistic interpretation and intervention into the
Australian landscape/soundscape and obtain value because of that. Their
framing and artistic choices are not the unimportant borders of the
work, but form part of the central meanings which they convey to the
listener.

[1] J. Berger, Ways of Seeing, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972, p10.

[2] J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4, CEC: Canada,
<http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000, date accessed: 3 rd
October, 2005.
[3] F. Lopez, “Schizophonia vs. L’Objet Sonore: Soundscapes and Artistic Freedom,”
eContact!, 1.4, <http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Ecology/Lopez.html>, Canada: CEC, 1998,
accessed: 4 th November, 2005. See also C. Cox, “Abstract Concrete: Francisco Lopez and
the Ontology of Sound,” Cabinet (online), 2, Spring 2001,
<http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/2/abstractconcrete.php>, accessed: 5 th November,
2005. This understanding of music as ‘ineffable’ recalls the 1961 work of Vladimir
Jankélévitch, only recently translated into English—Music and the Ineffable, Carolyn Abbate
(trans.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003.
[4] J. Jenkins, “Alan Lamb,” 22 Contemporary Australian Composers, 1988, reprinted online:
<http://www.rainerlinz.net/NMA/22CAC/lamb.html>, accessed: 6 th November, 2005.
[5] R. Bandt, Sound Sculpture: Sound and Sculpture in Australian Artworks, Sydney:
Craftsman House, 2001b, p32. A. McLennan ("Hollow Mansions of the Upper Air,"
<http://www.abc.net.au/arts/adlib/stories/s873159.htm>, ABC Online, 2003, accessed: 6 th
November, 2005) quotes Australian composer Percy Grainer from 1952: "What I meant by
'telegraph wire instrument' is an instrument that could imitate the gradually rising tones one
hears approaching a telegraph wire, the gradually sinking tones one hears going away from
a telegraph wire - in other words, gliding tones."
[6] Alan Lamb describes the “choir-like quality of wire music in which the sound is made up
of numerous voices, each competing for harmonic dominance.” (Quoted in R. Bandt, op. cit.,
2001b, p32.)
[7] J. Belfrage, “The Great Australian Silence: Inside Acoustic Space,” Australian Sound
Design Project, <http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/AusSilence.html>, May,
1994, accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[8] P. Carter, “Ambiguous Traces,” Australian Sound Design Project,
<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/site/papers/mishearing.html>, June, 2001,
accessed: 5 th November, 2005.
[9] A. Lamb, “Biographical Information—Artist, Composer, Sound Scupltor and Systems
Developer,” Australian Sound Design Project,
<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000277b.htm>, 2 July, 2002, accessed:
5 th November, 2005. Note the bracketed items here are grammatical corrections—Lamb’s
interview is somewhat ‘loose’ in its adherence to grammar.
[10] D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p3.

[11] R. Bandt, op. cit., 2001b, p32.

[12] F. Lopez, “Environmental Sound Matter,” <http://www.franciscolopez.net/env.html>, April,

1998, accessed: 4 th November, 2005.
[13] F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

[14] F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

[15] F. Lopez, op. cit., 1998.

[16] J. Iges, op. cit.

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Throughout these pages, I present a version of the argument Wishart
pursued nineteen years ago when he wrote that

if the term [landscape] is to have any significance in

[sound art,] we must define it as the source from which we
imagine the sounds to come. The loudspeaker
has...allowed us to set up a virtual acoustic space into
which we may project an image of any real existing
acoustic space, and the existence of this virtual acoustic
[1]
space presents us with new creative possibilities.

Creativity and imagination are the key words here. If Schafer’s ‘acoustic
ecology’ attempted a blank reportage of the world’s soundscape, it
initially refused to acknowledge the creative possibilities—outside of
realism—that could come from other techniques. It also denied the
falsehood of an equivalence between the real sounds of the environment
and the representation of them in the realm of technology (microphones,
[2]
amplification, speakers). Iges puts it nicely when notes that in sound
art, “memory appeals to forgetfulness to endow the work itself with
aesthetic meaning”—we must forget the original moment of recording in
order to properly appreciate the present replay.
Alan Lamb
Source: Australian Sound Design Project
The soundscape gains some of its aesthetic force from this tension
[4]
between true and false. In Ghost Towns (Room 40, 2004) English
edited down hours of material to 18 minutes that do not make this
compression apparent. Likewise, Alan Lamb’s Wind Organ is at once a
truth and a falsity. It is an ‘instrument’ he found in the West Australian
outback, but it is also an instrument he plays and compiles the best
moments of for release on CD. It is an element within that landscape,
but it is, again, manipulated to respond in particular ways. Falsity carries
no negative vector here—it is instead a byword for creativity, in the same
way it can be for writers of fiction and poetry.

Indeed, creativity/falsity is also another way to suggest that space is

always contested; ‘contested’ not always in a violent way, but in a way
that proceeds through varying and diffused engagements. The frame,
then, is always contingent, is always prone to slipping and re-setting by
another.

Such a way of conceptualising the spatial, moreover,

inherently implies the existence in the lived world of a
simultaneous multiplicity of spaces: cross-cutting,
intersecting, aligning with one another, or existing in
relations of paradox or antagonism. Most evidently this is
so because the social relations of space are experienced Lawrence English
Source: Cyclic Defrost
differently, and variously interpreted, by those holding
different positions as part of it. But it may also be seen to
be so by…analogy with modern physics. For there too the
observer is inevitably within the world (the space) being
observed. And this in turn means that it partly constitutes
the observer and the observer it, and the fact of the
observer’s constitution of it means that there is necessarily
[5]
a multiplicity of different spaces, or takes on space.

The artist is a presence in the world. Their recording is evidence of this—

they were there (in whatever sense one imagines this) and somehow
changed the space. Like a thumb covering the lens of a camera, the artist
alerts us to their own presence in the act of creation. Sound art, however,
instates the listener too as an agent of spatial and temporal memory. The
listener brings yet another set of understandings to the space imagined
by the work: Lamb’s wires hum in the wind and then it is our song to
sing.

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 [1] T. Wishart, “Sound Symbols and Landscapes,” The Language of Electroacoustic Music,
edited by Simon Emmerson, London: Macmillan, 1986, p43.
[2] J. Iges, “Soundscapes: A [sic] Historical Approach,” eContact! (online), 3.4, CEC: Canada,
<http://cec.concordia.ca/econtact/Histories/HistoricalApproach.htm>, 2000, date accessed: 3 rd
October, 2005.
[3] J. Iges, op. cit.

[4] J. Iges, op. cit.

[5] D. Massey, Space, Place and Gender, Cambridge: Polity, 1994, p3.

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Discography

English, Lawrence, Ghost Towns, Room 40, 2004.

Ferarri, Luc, Presque Rien, INA GRM, 1998 (1970).

Fullerton Whitman, Keith, Dartmouth Street Underpass, Locust Music, 2003.

Lamb, Alan, Primal Image, Dorobo, 1995.

-------------, Night Passage, Dorobo, 1998.

-------------, Wogarno Wire Installation (sound clips),

<http://www.sounddesign.unimelb.edu.au/web/biogs/P000278b.htm>, 1999.

Lopez, Francisco, Addy en el país de las frutas y los chunches, Alien8, 2003.

Motion: Movement in Australian Sound, Preservation, 2003.

Schaeffer, Pierre, OHM: The Early Gurus of Electronic Music, Ellipsis Arts, 2000

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 (1948).

Images

Image behind site logo taken from the website of Botany Department, University of
Melbourne. All other images as cited.

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