The Book of Music and Nature: An Anthology of Sounds, Words, Thoughts

The Poetics of Environmental Sound

The Poetics of Environmental Sound “The Poetics of Environmental Sound” consists of a listening exercise and quotations from about 150 diVerent responses to the exercise. The quotations are arranged as if the sounds and emotional qualities eVect a collaborative musical composition. It was first assigned to students at the University of California at San Diego as part of a liberal arts course known as The Nature of Music. This course encourages students to develop musical perception through group improvisation, graphic notation and tape composition. Theory students of Alvin Lucier at Brandeis University and Allen Strange at Indiana University also participated. “I Heard A Boy Singing Long Long Ago. He Rode With The Reins Loose And Let The Horse Go.” Robert Duncan Listen to the environment for 15 minutes or a longer but predetermined time length. Use a timer, clock or any adequate method to define this time length. Describe in detail the sounds you hear (heard) and how you feel (felt) about them. Include internal as well as external sounds. You are part of the environment. Explore the limits of audibility: (highest, lowest, loudest, softest, simplest, most complex, nearest, most distant , longest, shortest sound) “But Never Silence” “One thing I noticed right away was the absence of silence. There is always some kind of sound in the air.” “And between the thumps in the silences that grow longer, I am reminded that there is no silence.” [ 133 ] pauline 0liveros ⢇ “You’d never guess that so much sound could come out of a library which should be so quiet.” “It was like an orchestra with no rests, no silence anywhere.” “One instance I particularly remember came after a long period of intense silence.” “If it weren’t for these breaks in the monotony, this constant sound would become as a silence.” “I desire silence but there is none.” “I have just been in concert: the continuing concert of environmental sounds. I can hear it still.” “I sit quietly with my alarm clock, close my eyes and open my ears. At this point, the curtain rises and the performance begins. My very surroundings seem to come alive, each sound revealing the personality of its creator. There are several sounds which become fixed in my ear like some ‘basso ostinato’: the continuous whirring of factory machinery in the distance and the hollow sound of plopping water in a nearby fountain. This background of sound is interrupted by the piercing motif of a bird. A sudden breath of air sweeps across the deck. The pages of my book respond with quick snapping sounds. The door at the entrance squeaks and moans on the same pitch like an old rocking chair, then closes with a thud. I can hear the drapery from an opened window rustling against the coarse plastered walls, while the drawing cord syncopates against the windowpane.” “Cars smack the air and tires slap the road giving oV that highway sound, a low hiss that has no beginning or end, just a peak. The drone is established and only the sharp, high-pitched chirps and tweets of the birds persist in breaking the undertone.” “Only a couple of minutes have passed and things are getting really involved already.” “And then there were sounds that crept up on me, coming out of the drone, sharing the stage with or stealing it from the fountain, and then blending themselves unnoticed back into the drone. Obviously these were sounds without clearly-defined boundaries. A minor example of this type of sound is of a bus on a nearby road. The sound reached a level of only slight prominence and then disappeared leaving the listener unsure of the veracity of its very existence. But the sound of a jet-fighter traversing the breadth of the campus was quite a diVerent matter; first there was the drone, then the jet, and then the jet was all I knew. It did not, however, dominate, so to speak, the sound of the fountain. 134 ] pauline oliveros Actually, for the time that it was at its maximum, it adopted the fountain, so that the splashing seemed to be just another sound of the jet. And then the jet left while the ever-present splashing and droning continued.” “Every once in a while a bad apple would pass that would break the pattern; a poorly tuned car, or one that was going too fast would seem out of...