Environmental Sound Project for Students
Creating an Unorthodox Piece
To allow your teachers to gain a sense of your familiarity with DAW software, your ability to piece together a work from non-traditional sound sources, and your instincts with constructional design, this task involves your collecting of a range of atypical sounds and constructing a work that has a meaningful structure, momentum, an arc and a sense of musical development.
Photo by Grant Ritchie on Unsplash
TASK INSTRUCTIONS:
Read the information below (and in the external links) and listen to an excerpt of these pieces as preparation for your own.
Here is an extract from a conversation that was completed between ChatGPT on June 9, 2024:
Prompt:
I was wondering if you could assemble a list for me of pieces of music that are solely constructed from environmental sounds or just non-traditional sound forms. Do you have, say, THREE really solid examples of that?
Response:
- "The Great Animal Orchestra" by Bernie Krause - Krause's recordings of natural environments, including forests, rivers, and animal sounds, create immersive sonic landscapes.
- "Ocean Dream" by Paul Winter - This album features recordings of marine life and ocean waves, blending them into a symphonic composition.
- "Canticles of the Holy Wind" by John Luther Adams - Lauded by the New York Times as a “…hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong”.
ChatGPT. (2024, June 9). List of pieces of music constructed from environmental sounds or non-traditional sound forms. OpenAI.
The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause
Here are the notes that appear on YouTube:
The Great Animal Orchestra was commissioned by the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain as an immersive installation in 2016. London-based studio United Visual Artists (UVA) imagined a visual translation of Bernie Krause’s soundscapes, allowing (one) to listen to sounds and visualize them simultaneously. They designed a three-dimensional electronic installation, which is akin to the detail and complexity of a musical score, transposing the data from the recordings into light particles, thus highlighting the beauty of the sound environments presented.
Their audiovisual experience offers an immersive journey through seven territories recorded by Bernie Krause, chosen for their ecological diversity and the richness of their biophony, from Canada to the Central African Republic, from the United States to Zimbabwe, from Brazil to the oceans.
In a movie sequence realized by Raymond Depardon and Claudine Nougaret projected in between the soundscapes of the installation, Bernie Krause explains more about his approach and how biodiversity has dramatically deteriorated in recent decades. Presented successively in France, Korea, China, Italy and at 180 The Strand, London in the United Kingdom, the installation has been seen and listened to by a large and diverse international audience.
Combining aesthetics and technology, the installation The Great Animal Orchestra simultaneously offers an immersion into the heart of the sounds of nature, and a sound and visual meditation on the necessity of preserving the beauty of the animal world.
"Ocean Dream" by Paul Winter
https://paulwinter.bandcamp.com/track/ocean-dream-2
From the album "Whales Alive!" The song was inspired by Paul Winter's first experiences playing to whales from a small raft in the Pacific with a Greenpeace expedition in 1975. The seed theme comes from a humpback whale song recorded off Bermuda in 1964 by Frank Watlington.
Extracted from:
Paul Winter. (2019, September 12). Ocean dream, by Paul Winter and friends. Paul Winter. https://paulwinter.bandcamp.com/track/ocean-dream-2
"Canticles of the Holy Wind" by John Luther Adams
https://www.johnlutheradams.net/recordings/23
Lauded by the New York Times as a “…hypnotic and ethereally beautiful invocation of wind, sky and birdsong,” John Luther Adams’ Canticles of the Holy Wind, performed by the renowned chamber choir The Crossing, is his most technically challenging choral work, and yet the music’s mesmerizing aura of stillness encourages listening at its most elemental. The piece is composed for four choirs of eight singers each and moves through spaces that are as fantastical (“Sky with Four Suns”) as they are serene (“The Hour of the Doves”), always with a connection to our inner world, as well as the world around us.
“John allows us to interrupt our otherwise endlessly forward-tumbling lives,” notes Donald Nally, The Crossing’s conductor, “and experience these sounds as if we were sitting in the woods for an hour. An hour of wind and of sky and of birds. We are drawn to this music, not just for the beauty of its shimmering harmonies and the overwhelming climactic moments, but also for the way it inspires a ‘hearing’ of nature, in real-time, as we sing it.”
Extracted from:
John Luther Adams Homepage. John Luther Adams - Recordings. (n.d.). https://www.johnlutheradams.net/recordings/23
CREATIVE TASK:
Over your break, collect a number of different and diverse sounds (with your own recording device) and select your preferred DAW for this task (your teacher may suggest one of these for you). Create a work that has a particular musical intention in mind and that the musical decision-making is dictated by that intention. In other words, formulate a design that helps to illuminate your intent. For example, if you wish to create a work that comments on global warming, and the rising temparatures, you may wish to develop a structure that increases in speed, textural layering, the gradual compression of phrase lengths, etc.
Ensure that you conduct proper research into the topic and use the findings in creative and constructive ways. Ensure that you develop a bibliography along the way and that you are citing where necessary.
NOTE:
DAW stands for digital audio workstation, which is a piece of software you use to record, edit, and mix audio files. You can then combine those files into a singular audio file for submission.
Photo by Techivation on Unsplash
Here is an extensive list of DAW that you may wish to use for this task (click HERE). Some of them have free versions that you can access online.
Recommendation:
It is recommended that you plan out what you intend to do FIRST, such that the work does NOT merely produce a series of sounds. In other words, have a structure in mind for this and you may wish to have a broader (non-musical) goal in mind as well that would help with your musical decision-making.
For example, in the listening pieces offered above:
LISTENING EXAMPLE 1: The Great Animal Orchestra by Bernie Krause
Krausse writes, "...how biodiversity has dramatically deteriorated in recent decades". Here the broader goal of the composer is to comment on the changes that are occurring on our planet.
LISTENING EXAMPLE 2: "Ocean Dream" by Paul Winter
The song was inspired by Paul Winter's first experiences playing to whales from a small raft in the Pacific with a Greenpeace expedition in 1975. Perhaps the message here is that whales can communicate in very similar ways to humans and that the sanctity of life and the protection of the species should be paramount.
LISTENING EXAMPLE 3: "Canticles of the Holy Wind" by John Luther Adams
We are drawn to this music, not just for the beauty of its shimmering harmonies and the overwhelming climactic moments, but also for the way it inspires a ‘hearing’ of nature, in real-time, as we sing it.” Here, the broader goal is to perhaps better appreciate the natural sounds around us, as they can be inherently beautiful.
It is important to get into the habit of tracking your thoughts in the process of researching, creating, and presenting music. Changes in direction should be carefully documented and a rationale supplied for that shift in direction.
You may read more about this HERE or on this IB site Journaling.
Again, your teacher may have a particular platform that they adopt to track your thoughts over time. If not, begin one that you can easily access and transfer over if necessary. You may even wish to have a more traditional way of documenting your progress - pen and paper!
Some of the details that you may wish to include could be musical examples, audio files, external links, graphic illustrations, tables, questions, summaries, or any other forms of representing thoughts and ideas.