Listening to Place – Acoustic Ecology Fall Series ‘04

Listening to Place is a monthly series of informal talks on a broad range of topics featuring four nationally known sound producers who explore the sonic environment and the ways that humans interact with the world through sound. Each evening will include a variety of field recordings presented as integral components of the presentation. Questions and discussion will be welcomed.

Wednesday, September 8 – Jack Loeffler, “Listening to the Watershed”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio

Tuesday, October 5 – David Dunn, “Audible and Inaudible Sound Worlds: The Soundscape Recordings of David Dunn”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Monday, November 8 – Steven Feld, “Sonic Time, from New Guinea Rainforest Birds to European Bells”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Monday, December 6 – Jim Cummings, “Ears Wide Open: The Art, Science, and Public Policy of Acoustic Ecology”
Program Description
with Presenter Bio and photo

Info on our sponsors, the College of Santa Fe Contemporary Music Program and the American Society for Acoustic Ecology NM Chapter Sponsor Info

At The College of Santa Fe – Tipton Hall, 1600 St. Michaels Drive, Santa Fe NM

7:00 PM – 9:00 PM

Upcoming Program descriptions:

David Dunn, “Audible and Inaudible Sound Worlds: The Soundscape Recordings of David Dunn”

For over 30 years David Dunn has been recording the natural world as a sound artist, composer and bio-acoustician. This has led him to explore a wide range of diverse natural phenomena including many that are only accessible through the use of unique audio technologies that he has developed.

Dunn will present a full range of his recent work for consideration including underwater hydrophone recordings, vibration sensor recordings from the interior of trees and underground soil, and frequency expanded ultrasonic soundscapes that reveal the mysterious world of sonic communication beyond our normal hearing.  Some of the sounds to be presented include underwater insects, fire and harvester ants, the interior acoustics of prairie dog towns, piñon bark beetles, underwater hippos, and river crayfish.

His talk will range from the natural history and ecological significance of the sounds presented to personal anecdotes about the experience of making the recordings. He will also discuss some possible applications for these studies including the development of acoustic techniques for the early monitoring of bark beetles in conifers, and recent scientific studies on the human capacity for ultrasonic hearing.

David Dunn bio

Downloadable TIFF:
300dpi
Photo credit: Naomi Milne ; image approx. 4" x 3.5"

Composer and sound artist David Dunn was born in 1953 in San Diego, California. From 1970 to 1974 he was assistant to the American composer Harry Partch and remained active as a performer in the Harry Partch Ensemble for over a decade. He studied composition with David Ernst, Kenneth Gaburo, Norman Lowrey, and Pauline Oliveros; violin and viola with Mary Gerard, James Glazebrook, and Howard Hill; and physical theater techniques with Jerzy Grotowski. He has worked in a wide variety of audio media inclusive of traditional and experimental music, installations for public exhibitions, video and film soundtracks, radio broadcasts, and bio-acoustic research.

From 1984 to 1988 Dunn was Vice-President of the International Synergy Institute, a media think tank centered in Hollywood, California. He functioned as a creative consultant to a variety of major media and Hollywood studios, including Disney, Epcot, Turner Broadcasting and MGM, in addition to co-producing extended workshops for Hollywood executive personnel at the American Film Institute.

Dunn is the recipient of a variety of awards and grants including multiple grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (3), the Rockefeller Foundation (3), Langlois Foundation (2), McCune Foundation (2), Ford Foundation, Tides Foundation, New Mexico Arts Division, various Meet the Composer grants (4), academic research grants, and travel grants from the Japan Foundation and the United States Embassy to Argentina. In addition he has received numerous commissions from major institutions such as the National Gallery of Victoria, Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Commission. He is the composer of 56 major music compositions for various media, author/editor of 5 books and over 50 academic and theoretical publications in major journals with translations into seven foreign languages. Since 1973 he has given over 500 concert performances, lectures and radio broadcasts in North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Australia. He has over 100 additional international recording credits on LPs, CDs, internet, exhibition, film and video soundtracks.

In recent years he has lectured and/or performed at such prestigious venues as SoundCulture (Japan), Beyond Music Festival (USA), Ars Electronica (Austria), the Styrian Autumn Festival (Austria), L'Immagine Elletronica Festival (Italy), the Institute for New Media (Germany), New Music Across America, Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Fe), Composer to Composer Festival (Telluride), Santa Fe Institute, Experimenta Festival (Argentina), Cranbrook Art Academy, Instituto Torcuato Ditella (Argentina), Graduate Center of CUNY, The Exploratorium (San Francisco), Institute for Advanced Study  (Hungary), feature radio broadcasts throughout the world, various guest composer residencies at American universities, and wildlife field recording expeditions in North America, South America, Australia, and Southern Africa.

He is the author of Music, Language, and Environment (a cdrom of selected scores, writings, sounds, and images), Skydrift (a book documenting a large environmental sound project), and Why Do Whales and Children Sing?:A Guide to Hearing in Nature. He is the editor of Harry Partch: An Anthology of Critical Perspectives and Eigenwelt der Apparate-welt: Pioneers of Electronic Art. His works are published and distributed by Ars Electronica, Innova Recordings, O.O. Discs, EarthEar, Pogus Recordings, Lingua Press, Frog Peak, Deep Listening Publications, Nonsequitur Foundation, W.W. Norton, Gordon and Breach, Schirmer Books, the Inial Group, and IML Records.

Currently Dunn is President and Program Director of the Art and Science Laboratory and was recently artist-in-residence at the following institutions: Cranbrook Art Academy, Detroit Zoo, Center for Contemporary Art in Santa Fe, and the Art Technology Center at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In addition to his artistic work his current projects include sonification research of deterministic chaotic systems and the design of bioacoustic techniques for: tracking jaguars in New Mexico and Arizona, studying the acoustic properties of Narwhal teeth, high-speed sampling for ultrasonic recording, and the development of acoustic techniques for the early monitoring of bark beetles in conifers.

Website:
ASL

Steven Feld, “Sonic Time, from New Guinea Rainforest Birds to European Bells”

After twenty-five years of recording rainforest soundscapes in Papua, New Guinea, I’ve started to listen to Europe. I’m struck by a sonic resemblance: bells stand to European time as birds do to rainforest time. Daily time, seasonal time, work time, ritual time, social time, collective time, cosmological time — all have their parallels, with rainforest birds sounding as quotidian clocks and spirit voices, and European bells heralding civil and religious time.

The lecture will explore this comparison, with sound examples of how rainforest birds and European bells (with examples from Italy, Finland, France, Norway and Greece) sound the time of day, the time of prayer, the time of festival, the time of agriculture and transhumance. It will show how birds and bells change ambience with the season, making distance and dimension, and how they interact with other time and space-makers, including musical instruments.

 Steven Feld bio

Steven Feld is Professor of Anthropology and Music at the University of New Mexico., and visiting professor of Ethnomusicology at the Greig Academy of Music at the University of Bergen in Norway. A long time Santa Fe resident, he has been active in New Mexico music since the mid 1970s when he was a founder of the New Mexico Jazz Workshop. He previously taught at Columbia University, New York University, University of California at Santa Cruz, University of Texas at Austin, and University of Pennsylvania.

Feld’s research principally concerns the anthropology of sound and voice, incorporating studies in linguistics and poetics, music and aesthetics, acoustics and ecology. Since the mid-1970s he has studied the sound world of the Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. He has more recently researched the sound world of Greek Macedonia and Romani (“Gypsy”) instrumentalists.

Feld received a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation “genius prize” fellowship in 1991, and in 1994 was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the 2003 recipient of the Koizumi Fumio Prize, the major international award to honor an ethnomusicologist for a cumulative body of research. For 2003-2004 he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to pursue a multi-CD project on the history and culture of bells, with initial fieldwork in France, Finland, Norway, Greece, and Italy.

In 2003 he founded VoxLox Documentary Sound Art, a media label devoted to recordings in the field of human rights and acoustic ecology.

His books include the prize-winning Sound and Sentiment (1982/1990) and Music Groves (with Charles Keil, 1994), as well as Senses of Places (edited with Keith Basso, 1996), Bosavi-English-Tok Pisin Dictionary (with Bambi Schieffelin, 1998) and Jean Rouch: Cine-Ethnography (editor and translator, 2003).

His CDs include Voices of the Rainforest (1991); Rainforest Soundwalks (2001); Bosavi: Rainforest Music from Papua New Guinea (2001);  Bright Balkan Morning (2002); Bells and Winter Festivals of Greek Macedonia (2003); Primo Maggio Anarchico: A Soundscape of Anarchist May Day in Carrara (2003); and the initial releases on his VoxLox label, Iraqi Music in a Time of War: Rahim AlHaj Live in New York (2003), and The Time of Bells (2004).

Websites:
UNM Faculty Page
VoxLox

300dpi jpg: [DOWNLOAD JPG]
photo courtesy of Steve Feld

Jim Cummings, “Ears Wide Open: The Art, Science, and Public Policy of Acoustic Ecology”

To conclude the series, ASAE President Jim Cummings will present a wide-ranging overview of the field of Acoustic Ecology.  Cummings will begin with an introductory reverie on the connective power of listening, interspersed with field recordings from around the world. Along with a look at current research topics in sound ecology, he will discuss the ways that an acoustic ecology perspective is contributing to the development of public lands management and ocean regulations.  He will conclude with a number of examples of creative uses of field recordings in composition.

Jim Cummings bio

300dpi jpg: [DOWNLOAD]

Jim Cummings is a writer, editor, and founder of the Acoustic Ecology Institute and EarthEar. He has lived in northern New Mexico since the early ‘80s, and has written on environmental topics and music for Crosswinds, Pasatiempo, The Reporter, and New Mexico Magazine.  He was executive producer of a series of award-winning CDs on the EarthEar label, featuring soundscape composers and writers, including Steve Feld, David Dunn, Doug Quin, and David Rothenberg. He also edited and ghost-co-wrote Investing with Your Values (Bloomberg, New Society).

Websites:
EarthEar
Acoustic Ecology Institute

Past Presentations:

Jack Loeffler, “Listening to the Watershed”

Loeffler will address the importance of shifting out of a frame of reference dominated by geo-political boundaries and into a sphere of reference that includes clusters of related issues, topics, and notions that emanate from within the respective watershed or habitat.  He will play examples of points of view and music of indigenous peoples and bio-philosophers he’s recorded over the years.

Loeffler advocates grass roots activism in reshaping the destiny of habitat from within, and the profound importance of decentralization of political power, a condition born of anthropocentrism run amok.

Potential sources for recorded examples:

Roberta Blackgoat—Navajo
Vernon Masayesva—Hopi
Camillus Lopez—Tohono O’Odham
Rena Swentzell—Santa Clara Pueblo
Jose Abeyta- Isleta del Norte Pueblo
Jamie Pinkham- Nez Perce
Jesús Rojo Montaño- Seri
Clotilde Morales- Seri
Edward Abbey- writer, bio-philosopher
David Brower- environmental activist
William deBuys- writer and environmental activist
Gary Snyder- poet, environmental philosopher

Potential habitats to be considered:

Sonoran Desert San Juan River Valles Caldera

Jack Loeffler bio

Jack Loeffler is an aural historian, writer, radio producer and sound collage artist who has made his home in northern New Mexico since 1962.  He has produced nearly 300 documentary radio programs including the 13-part series entitled “The Spirit of Place,” and the 6-part series entitled “Moving Waters: The Colorado River and the West.” His most recent productions include a 3-CD sound collage entitled “Portrait in  Sound of an Ancient Road: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro,” and a 13 part documentary radio series concerning cultural elements of the American Southwest entitled “Southwest Sound Collage.”

     His books include Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey, La Musica de los Viejitos: The Hispano Folk Music of the Río Grande del Norte, and Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts. 

     He has recently been awarded a 4-year grant from the Ford Foundation to continue his field research throughout the American West and northwestern Mexico addressing the relationships of indigenous cultures to their respective habitats.  This grant will also result in a new 13-part radio series, a book entitled “The Lore of the Land”, and the digitization of his aural history archive to be donated to the Museum of New Mexico.

     Loeffler has long been an advocate of ‘watershed-thinking” taking precedence over geopolitical thinking.  He is soon to begin production of a 4-part radio series concerning the Río Grande watershed.

Sponsor Info:

The American Society for Acoustic Ecology (ASAE) is a membership organization dedicated to exploring the role of sound in natural habitats and human societies, and promoting public dialogue concerning the identification, preservation, and restoration of natural and cultural sound environments.

www.acousticecology.org/asae

The Contemporary Music Program is uniquely situated to provide intensive pre-professional studies within a liberal arts setting. A focus on training and skills acquisition to prepare students for careers in a broad range of contemporary music fields is matched with a commitment to the liberal arts tradition of cultural literacy, moral and philosophical development, personal responsibility, and citizenship in the broadest sense. The CMP embodies the belief that the goals of musical creativity are enhanced by simultaneous development of an articulate understanding of the roles of the arts within human culture and passionate advocacy for the position of the arts in contemporary society.

music.csf.edu

Contact Steven:
Southwest/Southern Rockies
Steven Miller, Jim Cummings, Steve Feld

Links to contacts for other Regional groups: [GO THERE]