Thank you Barbara, so much.
Thank you all for coming out on this chilly evening in Tucson.
What I'm going to do tonight is present a fly
through of a lot of the different work I've
been doing over the past maybe 30 years,
but particularly focus upon recent work.
And then even finish with work in progress,
and this will consist as much of listening to sounds as it
does listening to me.
I'm also going to be projecting the words that I'm reading,
and I do that intentionally, because I'm a big believer that
having these multimodal sensory inputs helped
to imprint us in a deeper way.
So with that said, I hope to leave enough ample time
for any questions that are triggered off in your mind,
and also having this to read from keeps me--
I tend to be a wind up toy.
So if I'm left to my own devices,
this would go on for six or seven hours
and be completely non-linear.
So this is a way of keeping myself reined in.
But during questions, we can have the chance
to really hopefully engage this in some other manner.
So with that said, I do call this listening
to hidden sound worlds and the necessity
of double description, that second part of the title,
hopefully, would become clear as I talk.
This is one of my favorite quotes from one
of my favorite thinkers, Gregory Bateson.
"The richest knowledge of the tree
includes both myth and botany."
A number of questions are consistent throughout my work.
What does music contribute to our understanding
of the question of mind?
What is accomplished by strengthening our aural sense
within a visually dominant culture?
What is gained or lost by a shift
towards an oral perception of the world?
How can art participate in the discovery
of solutions that can accelerate or extend those of science?
As a musician, I've witnessed the emergence
of a number of new genre of sonic and musical form
and research.
The past decade has seen the formation of biomusicology
as a discipline that attempts to clarify
our understanding of the biological origins of music.
Acoustic ecology aims to understand the integrative role
that sound has in our natural and urban environments.
There is also that vague nimbus of activity
called sound art that focuses upon the creation
of acoustically based art forms that do not
arise from a musical paradigm per se,
such as text sound composition, radio art, gallery, type
installation sound works, and site
specific sound performances.
A subset of this field that concerns
soundscape recording has adopted the term phonography--
I said that right--
to distinguish its activities.
Tangential to these new art genre
have been two areas of science.
Bio acoustics studies the sounds made by non-human living
organisms, and scientific sonification,
the oral equivalent to computer visualization techniques,
makes data more readily apprehensible through sound.
My position is that many of these new fields
are a logical evolution in musical practice
rather than a break with it.
If music in any way reflects the evolving human condition,
then this is what we should have expected music
to become in the 21st century.
While I still predominantly identify myself as a composer,
my work has been associated with all of the fields
in art and science as just described.
My works that span the 1970s and '80s
were predominantly site specific performances
that used traditional musical instruments, voices,
and electronics to explore interactions
with non-human living systems.
For instance, in 1973, I composed a work for three
trumpets intended to be performed within the interior
of the Grand Canyon.
I think everyone here knows where the Grand Canyon is.
The result was a surprising sonic encounter
between the three trumpets and three ravens
who were attracted to the commotion.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
[RAVENS CAWWING]
[MUSIC PLAYING]
And I'll just mention we never saw the ravens
before the trumpet started playing,
and we never saw them again after they stopped.
Here is another brief excerpt dating back to 1976
from one of the earliest experiments in music
as interspecies communication, where artist Ric Cupples and I
were feeding electronic sounds to a wild mockingbird
in order to challenge the bird's innate capacity
to imitate sounds in its environment.
[BIRDS CHIRPING]
[ELECTRONIC BEEPING]
Years later now, I think it might have been maybe
more interesting if we tried maybe
Charlie Parker or something else, but at the time,
it seemed to--
starting in the 1990s, my work shifted
towards phonographic soundscape recording as an oral equivalent
to visual photography.
It became clear to me that my preferred artistic medium
was recorded sound.
And since then, I rarely perform or create
installation-type work.
I also became deeply interested in how art and science can
become more tightly integrated towards seeking solutions
to real world environmental problems.
Over the past few years, my creative work and research
agenda have focused upon advancing my previous concerns
in new ways.
By the use of the term quote, "double description",
I hoped to not only give reference
to Gregory Bateson's invention of the term,
but also to a densely interwoven set of ideas and artifacts.
Throughout the various aspects of recent research
and creative projects, I've tried
to maintain the dual presence of metaphoric
versus mechanistic language representative of the two
different categories of understanding or explanation
called art and science.
Part 1 of a recent research project
uses the metaphoric language of historical reference
and philosophical argument to provide a context
for an accompanying artwork, The Micro Listening Project.
That project involves the design and construction
of a family of transducer mechanisms
appropriate for listening to previously
unfamiliar or unknown auditory phenomena
and presents examples of their use.
The text provides a context for this work that
places it within the domain of research's
artistic cultural practice and intentionally
makes problematic our dominant views about the roles
and relationship between science and art.
Part 2, mechanical communication in bark beetles
focuses one of these mechanisms towards hearing
a story in the sense of listening closely
to what one small part of the natural world can engender
and then attempts to explain it through the mechanistic
language of scientific method.
The accompanying paper on the mechanical communication
of bark and ambrosia beetles conceived
within the formal frame of a scientific research paper
can be more clearly understood as one part of a larger process
of artistic intervention.
Part 3, biological autonomy as a model for autonomous
audio devices begins a process of leaping towards a meta
level, where the design of artifacts
occurs with consideration to their dual status
as both metaphors and mechanisms.
Autonomous audio devices are put forth, not so much
to illustrate a comprehensive methodology for reconciling
the cultures of art and science as one instance where they can
be seen to become congruent without losing their identities
in each separate domain.
This final section sets forth the barest glimpse
of a vision for a middle path, where rigor and imagination
are merely shades within an integrated spectrum
of human perception and action.
These devices directly emanate from my experience
of soundscape recording and represent a highly abstract
description of such complex natural sound worlds,
while also serving as instrumentation
for scientific research.
Here are some brief examples of sound recordings
from my recent work that were made using
four of my transducer systems.
One, the strident scratching of ants communicating deep
in their underground nest.
[SCRATCHING]
That's one ant.
[SCRATCHING]
[BIRD CAWWING]
That's not an ant.
[LAUGHTER]
[SCRATCHING]
[BIRD CAWWING]
Two, the frantic underwater communications
of tiny invertebrate life forms in freshwater ponds.
These kinds of sounds are to be found
within a vast variety of ponds and lake sides
all over the world.
We know very little about the sources for these sounds
except they are very soft, require hydrophones,
underwater microphones, and tremendous amplification
to bring them to our ears since they are otherwise
inaudible to human hearing.
[BEETLES WHIZZING]
Three, the eerie ultrasonic echolocation bursts
of many different species of bats flying
over a Mexican river at night.
Frequency shifted down into our human hearing range.
There are also the ultrasonic croaks
of small unidentified toads, possibly the first recordings
made of what may be the first amphibian species discovered
in the Western hemisphere to communicate ultrasonically.
[BATS ECHOLOCATING]
And finally, four, the chirping and scraping of tiny beetles
chewing through the inner bark of pine trees.
These were the first recordings of bark beetles ever made
in actual forest conditions within the interior of a living
tree.
[BEETLES CHIRPING]
Another sound example illustrates the audio behaviors
of my autonomous circuits as a means
to directly experience the kinds of non-linear chaotic change
that underlies so much of the natural world.
The sounds produced by these circuits
based on principles of biological autonomy
are not only intended as sonic structures
to be experienced as auditory art,
they are also part of an experimental strategy being
pursued by Richard Hofstadter and Regan Maguire
at Northern Arizona University to interfere
with the communication of invertebrates,
such as the invasive bark beetles that you just heard.
The hope is that judiciously applied
sound can be used as an insect control mechanism, where
nothing else has worked.
Initial tests have yielded some extraordinary results,
and I wish I could tell you more,
but we're about to file a provisional patent, which
constrains my ability to talk about it,
but suffice to say it seems to work.
[ROARING NOISE]
Show of hands, how many--
if you heard that-- would drive you out of a tree?
[LAUGHTER]
OK, good.
Good.
This is all useful data.
So at this point, I think it appropriate
that I allow you to hear a more extended example of some
of the even more controversial aspects of my work
that combine many of the different issues and concerns
that I've been discussing.
Here is an extended sample of a project
called Autonomous Systems, Red Rocks,
where the concepts of self-organizing systems
in biological autonomy have been applied to the real time
interaction between artificial and natural non-human systems.
A computer program associated-- and associated sound system
respond to the sounds of a wetlands habitat,
each pursuing autonomous behaviors
that are perturbed and influenced
by each other in a kind of cybernetic dialogue.
This is for a few minutes.
[HIGH PITCHED BEEPING]
[HIGH PITCHED WHIRRING]
And one of the interesting things
about these sorts of experiments is
that I think one assumes that they'd
function as sonic tear gas to drive everything away,
and actually, the opposite happens.
That things begin to accommodate, not only become
accommodate to the fabric that's created,
but also become curious.
And over time, the longer this played, actually the more
activity and the closer the wildlife
actually came to these electronic sources that
were obviously seeing quite foreign
to their actual environment.
So I'm just going to talk now a bit
about these current projects that I'm engaged in,
some of which are very recent and some of which
are quite ongoing over a period of years,
but they're the things that are really
concerning me at the moment.
I'm currently fulfilling a commission
from the Kyoto City University of the Arts
to create a sound installation that
celebrates the Centennial of the completion of the canal that
links Lake Biwa, Japan's largest freshwater lake,
to Kyoto, providing the city's primary water supply.
The canal passes through a mountain range to connect
to the [INAUDIBLE- ? Heian ?] Jingu shrine,
where the extensive pond system preserves aspects of the 19th
century ecology and helps to preserve several endangered
species.
The installation will make use of underwater sounds drawn
from both the lake and the pond system
in order to emphasize the city's dependency upon its surrounding
natural resources.
Here is an example of the underwater world
of the [INAUDIBLE-- ? Heian?] ] Jingu shrine, where koi,
fingerlings, and various invertebrates live.
Combined with the ultrasonic components of the above water
world, birds, footsteps, and wind chimes
slowed to be audible within the human hearing range,
they take on the mysterious quality of gagaku music.
[DRIPPING]
[NOTES PLAYING]
My fascination with the world of sound assumed
to be beyond human perception has been a recurrent interest
over the past several years.
Besides the revelation of sounds made
by a rich diversity of non-human living systems,
I've been tracking the surprising occurrence
of intense ultrasonic sources that fill our human world
and most likely affect our bodies
and confusing and destructive ways.
Here are the ultrasonic sounds of life support systems.
Other machinery and a television set
in a typical hospital room brought down
into our hearing range.
[LOW FREQUENCY BEEP]
The low frequency sounds that you
hear are the television set.
I think it was a sitcom.
[LOW FREQUENCY BEEP]
Next are the ultrasonic sounds of a classroom,
with the whirring of multiple computers shifted
into our hearing range.
The changing low frequency sound is that of the teacher's voice.
You can gauge the relative amplitude of it
to the other sounds that are thought
to be outside of the domain of our perception.
The problem is that recent research
shows that we do unconsciously perceive
these sounds through facial fluid channels and upper body
tissues, just not through our ears.
Furthermore, we know that such sounds at sufficient amplitude
can damage neural tissue.
[LOW FREQUENCY WHIRRING]
I'm gonna give you one final ultrasound example that returns
us to the non-human world.
These bat sounds were recorded in a New Mexico canyon
after nightfall when the bats were emerging from their caves
and rock crevices to hunt insects with their echolocation
bursts.
Our co-evolution with these second most numerous mammals
on Earth might explain why humans do not perceive
ultrasound through our ears.
These echolocation bursts are so loud that many species of bats
have autonomic shutters on their ears to protect them
from their own sounds.
If we had to consciously listen to these sounds all night,
we might never have slept.
Or worse, our ears might have been
damaged by the constant auditory barrage
of these omnipresent creatures.
[CHIRPING]
So given the avalanche of messages that we are now
receiving from the Earth in the form
of disrupted natural cycles, human overpopulation,
increasing natural disasters, unprecedented collapse
of biological diversity, global climate change
and atmospheric destruction, et cetera,
it seems apparent that we are truly
beginning to pass through the eye
of the environmental needle.
Since it is the essential nature of non-linear chaotic change
to be unpredictable, no one can foresee the exact outcome
of the changes that we are beginning to bear witness to.
Underlying all of this project is a polemic
that argues for the necessity of an oral art form
that positions itself within a discourse between art
and science and where the non-human living
world consequently takes center stage.
Ultimately, I hope that my work highlights
an essential question, can art participate
in the discovery of solutions that can accelerate or extend
those of science?
This requires a merger of art and science
that places the human back into a measured position
within the biotic world and encourages
both to contribute to a collective environmental
activism.
While the art world needs to ground imagination
in a deeper understanding of the natural world,
science needs to reach out beyond the desiccation
of professional constraints in order
to transform the epistemic errors of the world at large.
Together, they need to understand and embrace
the continuity of human and non-human communication
as essential components of the complex networks
from which both perception and evolution arise.
Perhaps, once again, Gregory Bateson said it best.
"Rigor alone is paralytic death.
Imagination alone is insanity."