ANDERS HULTQVIST

Invisible Sounds, both a Compositional and an Ecological Sound Art project which explores place through the minute detail of sound and vibration, also beyond the limits of human listening. With participation and artistic action as method, the project wishes to create novel understandings and heightened awareness of our environment, seeking to highlight nested ecological spaces through a widened sense of sound and place. By studying structurally meaningful musical and sonic interaction through combining instrumental and sound composition with sensor technologies, the project also aims to expand some of our human understanding of, and engagement with, the” more-than-human” world.

Sounds by Water and Trees was created through a participative approach to the sonic environment, where performers produce sounds in dialogue with a specific site: an approach to environmental sound art that moves beyond preservation, as a model of ecology, towards interaction and co-operation with the environment through participation rather than representation.

’Natural’ and man-made sounds become enmeshed in and through a network that in many ways instantiates itself. There’s no inherent hierarchy of importance in the flow of sounds, and in the systemic flow different sound constellations emerge as occasional forefronts of the overall soundscape. A sort of recursive dependency evolves in the way sounds of different origins grow out of, and in relation to, each other.

The compositional process, enacting a series of loops between the inner hearing of the writing process and the concrete listening to the pre-recorded sound from the site, displayed the nested character of such an engagement with composition and soundscape listening. The scored and the improvised materials were created through a sort of double mirroring: the written material takes as its point of departure both the raw sound recordings as well as how the musicians respond to the sounding environment.

A third musical level emerges when the scored music is performed by the entire ensemble, effectively bringing the artistic response to the original site-specific explorations to a recording situation in a studio environment. A sounding geography is created where detailed acoustic events are put into a clear relief but also in relation to, and included in, a larger ambient sounding milieu.

A fourth level of interaction can be observed in the complex set of loops, initiated with Östersjö’s aeolian guitar recordings on site, which were transformed in several steps by playing back the original recording through different acoustic instruments, using transducers attached to the instrument.

Sounds by Water and Trees is essentially an attempt to stage a set of interactions between human and environment, wherein at times the intentionality of the sound produced by the wind and the waves has a similar agency to that of performers and composers, all engaging in the shaping of sound.

The project was supported by the Swedish Art Grants Committee and the Swedish Research Council (VR) together with the Academy of Music and Drama, Univ. of Gothenburg and Luleå University of Technology.