Nature Recording and The Broadband World

May 7, 2011

Some notes on Francisco López and Nature recording:

Francisco López’s recordings present to the ear nature in general more than anything specifically natural. In his recordings we hear sounds that can easily be classified as natural, but the ontological function of López work does not serve a taxonomy of the natural and unnatural or one of preservation. At the same time this work can, for a number of reasons, be classified as nature recording. In López’s work we get a sense of nature not as that domain into which humans encroach with their incessant throbbing machines, a domain that would remain pure and unspoilt without us, but as something more fundamental, ambiguous and obscure. Nature is in López’s recordings heard to be something which both gives shape to and destroys domains and the well grounded, something that persists in excess of the division of kingdoms—it is that which may remain clear and referential or slip into monstrous a-referential obscurity. López’s recordings present a focus less upon the specific individuals, bodies or species constituting a given natural domain than one upon nature in general:

I find particularly limiting the habitual focus on animals as the main elements of the sound environment […] If our perspective of nature sounds were more focused on the environment as a whole, instead of on behavioural manifestations of the organisms we foresee as most similar to us, we could also deal with plant bioacoustics … a sound environment is not only the consequence of all its sound-producing components, but also of all its sound-transmitting and sound-modifying elements. The birdsong we hear in the forest is as much a consequence of the bird as of the trees or the forest floor. If we are really listening, the topography, the degree of humidity of the air or the type of materials in the topsoil are as essential and definitory as the sound-producing animals that inhabit a certain space (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter).

Against a limitation of the practice of nature recording to that of a limited set of organic or biotic species, López opens nature recording onto a radically  expanded set of agents that are considered influential within the determination of a sound field: not only animals but plants and apparently ‘inert’ base matters. This expanded focus that takes into account the inorganic acknowledges the broadly contingent nature of sonorous productions, their dependencies upon bodies of all kinds for their production, transmission and reception. The extensive contingency of sound space, sonic environments or acoustic ecology that is acknowledged in López’s expanded audition mirrors the expansive definition of the ‘acoustic community’ that we find in Barry Truax’s work:

The acoustic community may be defined as any soundscape in which acoustic information plays a pervasive role in the lives of the inhabitants […] therefore, the boundary of the community is arbitrary and may be as small as a room of people, a home or a building, or as large as an urban community, a broadcast area, or any other system of electroacoustic communication. In short, it is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged (Barry Truax, Acoustic Communication, 66).

Again, we should note that Truax’s definition of the acoustic community is broader than he perhaps intends; while it is assumed that this community be comprised of humans, the expansive definition that Truax furnishes us with, according to which an acoustic community ‘is any system within which acoustic information is exchanged’, extends the notion of an acoustic community to a point where its definition easily encompasses the inhuman and the inorganic (Truax’s notion of the acoustic community is also discussed here). The subjects of acoustic ecology can therefore not be limited to the organic nor the living, but must take into account the inorganic, ‘inert’ and base.

This extensive awareness of the contingency of the soundscape and an expanded notion of the acoustic community—taking into account weather, systems, soil, plantlife, animals (including humans), considered amidst López’s tendency to include or not remove human and inorganic sounds from his recordings—marks a more general tendency in López’s thought to move from the specific to the general, or from the somatic to the dynamic. López’s approach attempts to focus attention on an environment as a whole, upon the confusion of bodies that leads to a blurred distinction between the otherwise discrete. This purposive confusion which aids a shift from the specific to the general entails a confusion of the distinction between foreground and background, as here signal distinction does not hold the privilege that it does within Schaferian ecology, wherein such confusion leads towards the emergence of a ‘lo-fi’ soundscape: the confusion of background noise and signal transmissions (what Lopez’s work suggests is that we consider nature itself as the ultimate lo-fi soundscape). Foreground is, in López’s recordings, strictly relative to the position of the listening subject (whether that be a human or a microphone, as both are considered to have agency within López’s work):

sound-producing animal species appear together with other accompanying biotic and non-biotic components of the sound environment that happened to be there when the recordings were done. In this sense, there is no purposeful a priori distinction of foreground / background, but only their unavoidable arisal due to the location of the microphones, as it happens with our ears. I’m not claiming objectivism […] but rather that the ‘focus’ of my attention was the sound environment as a whole (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter).

This approach towards ‘the sound environment as a whole’ rather than discrete signal events contained within it is exemplary of a more general tendency to shift from the specific to the general, from that which is clear and distinct to that which is more confused, abstract or obscure. López’s Nature or field recording is a site orientated practice that is more abstract than specific. The practice of field recording frequently deals with the specifics of place or that which we might most readily associate with site-specific practice: identifying the auditory determinants of place and identity, the interactions and individuals that make them significant, drawing out that which is specific to a particular location, amplifying the peculiar details or framing them through dislocation, setting it apart from others, or from space in general. Yet it would be too gross a generalisation to suggest that field recording is primarily concerned with the representation of place, with an accurate auditory reconstruction of a given or specific site. In many—what I consider the most interesting—cases the intention of the artist is not that of representation but the transmission of a generative sonic materiality that may appear abstract to the ear when schizophonically dislocated. A site-specific sound practice can be broadly considered to deal with that which is peculiar to a given locale. Yet such practices lock sound into the operations of representation, drawing it out of itself towards the image of the referent and into a symbolic framework that leads to the sacrifice of sound itself to the efficacy of the symbolic. What is problematic in such instances is not that sound is drawn out of ‘itself’ but that the image of the referent remains too rigidly fixed, limiting the scope of the extension. Many artists, however, progress from a specificity to the particular abstraction that is sound itself, or the qualities of a sound that are only uncovered where the mind is not drawn into indexical operation, searching for the originary cause or referent from which a sound emerged or to which it refers, but to that which is particular to the sound itself as an a-referential and affective object. This progression towards abstraction forces a displacement or dislocation insofar as the site-specificty or locational referentiality of a recording becomes obscure, it moves from the sound of the specific place to sound itself, a sound that immanently constructs a space, forces relations and simultaneously drives apart. This progression away from the specific through a practice of abstraction can be discussed in terms of a movement from the specific to the general, moving from the referential specificity according to which ‘difference in intensity is already cancelled because it is drawn outside itself’ towards the uncovering of the power of sound ‘in general’ through its abstraction, a movement towards a sonic energy in general:

energy in general or intensive quantity is the spatium, the theatre of all metamorphosis or difference in itself […] energy or intensive quantity is a transcendental principle […] in terms of the distinction between empirical and transcendental principles, an empirical principle is the instance which governs a particular domain […] The transcendental principle does not govern any domain but gives the domain to be governed to a given empirical principle; it accounts for the subjection of a domain to a principle. The domain is created by difference of intensity, and given by this difference to an empirical principle according to which and in which the difference itself is cancelled (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 301).

Where abstraction drives a practice of phonography what is revealed to the ear is not necessary a site-specific audition—that which pertains to a particular domain—but rather that which tends towards domains in general, that which ‘gives the domain’; this progression is one from specificity to intensity, from identity to difference—or identities differential conditions—a process towards abstraction that uncovers the ‘the nature of difference (as individuating difference)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 339). The uncovering of an individuating difference in a shift from the representational and specific to the general, abstract and obscure draws audition towards the intensive production of space anterior to the recognition of its constituent and apparently discrete bodies, it marks a shift from the specific identity of a place to the generative conditions of space, from site specificity to a catalytic ‘site-magnification’ (to borrow a term from Mark Bain).

This transition from the specifics of identification and audile taxonomies to sound in general is mirrored in López’s preference for the notion of sound matter over sound objects, a terminological preference that mirrors his preference for the general ahead of the specific, the confusing over the clear and distinct, for environments as a whole rather than the well grounded identities of the individual bodies that compose them. The shift from objects to matter is one that seeks to place some distance between a practice of nature recording that is based upon the audible representation of a place or individual animals, objects, bodies or events and a field recording practice that aims to uncover something of the generative ‘interiority’ of events, of those sounds that in their abstraction are heard as noise, sounds that in their obscurity reveal something of the material capacities underpinning their implication within representation, recognition and indexical listening: ‘The richness of this sound matter in nature is astonishing, but to appreciate it in depth we have to face the challenge of profound listening. We have to shift the focus of our attention and understanding from representation to being’ (Francisco López, Environmental Sound Matter). López’s notion profound listening is set apart from Schaefferian reduction, yet nonetheless retains a critical function in the form of an abstract auscultation. The shift from ‘representation to being’ again mirrors a shift from objects to a more abstract notion of matter; where an objective orientation is considered to submit to easily or willingly to representation aided by its necessary discretion, López’s sonic materialism is orientated towards an informative noise in excess of objective discretion, towards a dynamic and generative capacity of sound in general that understands ‘sound matter in nature’ as an ontological problem and nature in general as ‘the nature of difference (as individuating difference)’ (Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 339). In this transition from a Schaefferian discourse of objects to one of sonic matter, we move from a somatic conception of nature to one that is primarily dynamic, focusing upon that which is either anterior to or in excess of that which appears unified and discrete. Insofar as López’s practice remains identifiable as a practice of Nature recording, we are dealing with what Iain Hamilton Grant refers to as a ‘philosophy of nature itself […] [that] is no longer grounded in somatism, but in the dynamics from which all grounds, and all bodies issue’ (Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature after Schelling, 8).

It is such a dynamic conception of nature that López appears to ascribe to, one where nature is not something pristine that is to be preserved but a force of constantly unfolding difference, an unceasing generative capacity, an understanding of nature as ‘the nature of difference’. López is famous for his disregard for the distinction between noise and nature, a distinction usually enforced through the identification of human and non-human sounds. Here we take noise to be synonymous with difference and difference with nature, thereby identifying the primary subject matter of nature recording as noise. This noise names the confusion of objects, bodies and events that López refers to as the environment as a whole, a noise that is not the enemy of the acoustic community but its generative potential, a ‘broad-band sound environment of thrilling complexity’. The broad-band nature of this sound environment places it in proximity with common understandings of noise, and more precisely the noise of nature. Noise, understood as the expression of nature’s generative potentials,  can be otherwise considered as the Idea of sound:

the Idea of colour, for example, is like white light which perplicates in itself the genetic elements and relations of all colours, but is actualized in the diverse colours with their respective spaces; or the Idea of sound, which is also like white noise (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 258).

This brief reference to Ideas appears obscure until we consider that, for Deleuze,  ‘Ideas are precisely the ultimate elements of nature’ (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 205), therefore locating noise within nature and identifying the generative and informative site constitutive of López’s ‘non-bucolic broadband world’. Yet we must go further than López if we are to address the problem of noise both within and as nature. López touches upon such a step where he refers to the necessity of shifting from questions of representation to being, a step towards a specifically ontological question. Yet to recognise the importance of this step we must take it a step further than López, moving not only from representation to being, but from perception to the being of the in-itself, a shift from the phenomenological to the imperceptible, a shift that is evident in Michel Serres’ considerations of noise:

Noise cannot be a phenomenon; every phenomenon is separated from it, a silhouette on a backdrop, like a beacon against the fog [...] every signal must be separated from the hubbub that occupies silence, in order to be, to be perceived, to be known, to be exchanged. As soon as a phenomenon appears, it leaves the noise. So noise is not a matter of phenomenology, so it is a matter of being itself (Serres, Genesis, 13).

López’s call for a shift from representation towards a being that treats as synonymous Ideas of noise and nature must also, if we accept Serres’ observations, entail a shift away from phenomenological sufficiency if we are to being to grasp both ‘the Idea in nature’ and ‘the excess of physical becoming over the phenomenologically accessible’ (Iain Hamilton Grant, Philosophies of Nature, 44).

| Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , | More: Subtractions