AFAE - Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology. Reported by Susan Frykberg
Annual General Meeting Held. The Australian Forum for Acoustic Ecology (AFAE) had its AGM on Nov 8, 2012 and elected a new president, Jordan Lacey. Current president Anthony Magen has stepped down and taken up the pen of secretary. We thank Anthony for all his hard work as past president and his future hard work as secretary. We are excited to welcome new members, Susan Frykberg, who worked extensively in soundscape in Vancouver in the nineties, and Queensland composer, sound artist and curator, Leah Barclay. We thank the committee of AFAE for all their excellent work over the year. We encourage visitors to our website. We look forward to a productive year ahead.
Member News
Jim Barbour alerts us to a major change in the ubiquitous electroacoustic technology of movie sound mixing and playback - the new Dolby Atmos™ cinema playback system. This 3D cinema playback system includes up to 64 loudspeakers in fully equipped cinemas including 2 overhead arrays and many more speakers around the auditorium, with each speaker individually addressable. Sound information will be handled as both sound objects and layers, rather than a purely channel based approach. The potential for full envelopment and immersion in a 3D acoustic space will require new skills and understanding among post production staff, and these skills are nowhere more evident than in our Acoustic Ecology and Sound Art communities.
Leah Barclay has just joined the management committee of the AFAE. Leah is a composer, sound artist and curator who works internationally on acoustic ecology projects. She creates complex sonic environments, realised through immersive performances and multi-sensory installations, incorporating environmental field recordings, multi-channel sound diffusion, live performers and ephemeral projections. She also creates large-scale community projects such as Biosphere Soundscapes, designed to inspire communities across the world to listen to the environment, and re-imagine the potential of Biosphere Reserves as learning laboratories for a sustainable future. The project connects and inspires the communities of global Biosphere Reserves through emergent technologies, innovative creative practice and soundscape ecology. This project was launched in the Noosa Biosphere Reserve on World Listening Day 2012 and is currently expanding in Biosphere Reserves across Australia. Photo: Biosphere Soundscapes
Catherine Clover (AFAE) and Johanna Hällsten (UKISC) are collaborating on a project based on a shared interests in the human-animal relationship, in particular their relationship with wild urban birds. The artists have been invited to collaborate on a site-specific response to St John’s Church Bethnal Green London, UK. The invitation comprises a five week residency at the church from the 27th May to 4th July 2013 culminating with an exhibition, opening on Thursday 4th July. The exhibition will run until 27th July. Their focus will be on the interactions between the different communities present in this area, both human and animal, and the cohabitation of the spaces. Most wild urban birds, apart from birds of prey, are very sociable species and are often much more audible than visible. The calls and vocalisations of the birds are therefore a major interest and considering their song via the structures of human language, specifically the congregation’s voices through both song and spoken word will be a means of engaging church goers and the wider community with this project.
Susan Frykberg has recently joined the management committee of AFAE and is being guided into the role of International Officer and AFAE Affiliate Representative by Nigel Frayne. She looks forward to many future AFAE and WFAE interactions.
Lawrence Harvey is Associate Professor and Director of the SIAL Sound Studios, a centre for auditory spatial research, teaching and events in the School of Architecture and Design at RMIT University, Melbourne. His research interests are in the design, composition and artistic direction of diverse spatial sound projects, and the auditory spatial experience of listeners. He leads projects in which electroacoustic practices seek to advance the auditory spatial awareness of students and researchers in the academy and the general community. Recent projects include artistic direction and sound diffusion for five concerts at the Melbourne Recital Centre, spatial performance research with Elision Ensemble at the 2011 Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival and a report on Melbourne’s Five Urban Soundscape Systems, a unique cluster of five multi-channel soundscape systems (including a permanent sonic artwork titled Proximities) along the Yarra River. Photo: SIAL Sound studios
Jordan Lacey (AFAE President) organized a two stage project around a dominating exhaust fan outlet in a socially active space, (a market and meeting point for staff and students), as part of a Soundscape Studies class he taught at RMIT University. First, he shut down the exhaust fan and the class observed the changes to the space during the shutdown, the most pronounced of which was the emergent sense of human habitation. Second, he placed speakers on either side of the exhaust fan to attempt to transform the sound by electroacoustic means. The paper, available as a downloadable PDF, gives a detailed account of the process and was presented at the May 24-26 2012 Northern World Mandate Cumulus Helsinki Design Conference at Aalto University.
Anthony Magen continues with his work Endangered Sounds - An Acoustic History of Brunswick - Melbourne. Recent zoning changes in the area have resulted in displacement of people and industry, particularly clothing manufacture. But the recent past has been honored by collecting oral histories, recording buildings and machines, (using a variety of recording techniques - stereo, ambisonic, contact mic and locative recordings from street locations). These are then made available to current and past residents, as well as tourists as iphone apps. Photo: Endangered Sounds.
ASAE - American Society for Acoustic Ecology. Reported by Jay Needham, President
The ASAE Board recently held an election and I would like to introduce several new members. Stephan Moore will be serving as ASAE Vice President. Moore is pursuing his doctorate at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. He is active as a sound artist, writer, curator, and a member of the New England Forum for Acoustic Ecology.
Kenya Williams will be serving as the ASAE Membership Coordinator. Kenya is an environmental planner who specializes urban planning, acoustic ecology, soundscape management and urban design. He is pursuing his doctorate in Urban Studies Ph.D. program at Portland State University and a member of the Pacific Northwest Society for Acoustic Ecology.
Dave Aftandilian is serving another term as ASAE secretary. Dr. Aftandilian is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas. He holds a B.A. from Cornell University, and Master’s and Ph.D. degrees in Anthropology from the University of Chicago. Most recently, he has begun a new project with Gavin Van Horn of the Center for Humans and Nature in Chicago entitled “City Creatures.” The goal of the project is to raise awareness about and inspire caring for nonhuman animals in Chicago, which they will do through an “Animal Encounters” blog, an edited book of accessible essays from multidisciplinary and trans-disciplinary perspectives, and selected public events.
In addition to serving as President of the WFAE, Eric Leonardson will also serve as the ASAE Affiliate Representative to the WFAE Board. Leonardson is founder, and co-chair of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology with fellow composer and instrumentalist, Christopher Preissing, and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Sound at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. In early 2013 Leonardson serves as a Copeland Fellow at Amherst College in its Colloquium on "Art in Place / the Place of Art."
The ASAE expresses our deep gratitude and thanks our past Vice President and ASAE Affiliate Representative, Andrea Polli who served in this role for many years, especially through this phenomenally busy and successful year that included service as Artistic Director of ISEA2012 Machine Wilderness. Andrea played a leading role in the New York Society for Ecology (NYSAE) and the formation of the Midwest Society for Acoustic Ecology (MSAE), and I hope will remain an active force for acoustic ecology in the Southwest Society for Acoustic Ecology (SWSAE) and the Art & Ecology Program at the University of New Mexico. Finally, the ASAE thanks Michael Doherty for serving as ASAE's Membership Coordinator, and founder of the Colorado Society for Acoustic Ecology since July 2011.
Member News:
Jay Needham's recordings of Panamanian Neoropical rainforests will be a part of a new biodiversity museum in Panama. Designed by Frank Gehry, the Biomuseo features many perminant exhibits. The Panamarama, is a 3 story immersive audiovisual space depicts the natural history of the region and the creation of the Isthmus of Panama.
Other News:
R. Murray Schafer writes new book. My Life on Earth and Elsewhere is a memoir by the internationally-acclaimed Canadian composer, music educator and writer R. Murray Schafer (CASE) which will be published May 1, 2013. ReadMore
Truax Article in new Journal. Barry Truax (CASE) has had his article, Soundscape and Acoustic Sustainability, published in the new online journal Moebius. "The article largely deals with issues of the interface between music and environment, what musicians can contribute to current issues of sustainability (at least in the acoustic realm) and observations on how real-world concerns can be integrated into compositional activity." The first issue of Moebius also includes articles by Robert Zwinenberg and David Dunn.
McCartney Article discusses Westerkamp Composition. Andra McCartney (CASE) and Marta McCarthy (CASE)have written about Hildegard Westerkamp's (1990) composition École Polytechnique as an artistic response to one of Canada's most profoundly disturbing mass murders, the 1989 slaying of fourteen women in Montreal, Quebec. "Using the theoretical model, derived from Haraway, of the cyborg body, and analyzing the import of the mixed media (voices, instruments and electroacoustic tape) incorporated in the music, the authors examine the impact this work has had on some of those who have heard it and performed it, based on the responses of choristers and listeners in several studies. The authors explored how those who engaged significantly with the music, (including those who had no personal association with the actual events of the 1989 massacre), were able to make relevant connections between their own experience and the composition itself, embrace these connections and their disturbing resonances, and thereby experience meaningful emotional growth." The article appears in Music and Arts in Action, Vol 4, No 1 (2012).
Débats Manèges at La Maréchalerie. The contemporary art gallery, La Maréchalerie, a part of École Nationale Superieure d'Architecture Versailles, recently featured the sonic environment in the last event of the lecture/debate series "Débats Manèges", on 6th December, 2012 in Versailles, France. The debaters were: Roberto Barbanti, Pessi Parviainen (FSAE); moderated by Emeline Eudes.
Media Writing Prize 2012. 'Window', an interactive sound-essay by Katharine Norman, on Cage, listening and everyday sonic experience, recently won the 2012 New Media Writing Prize. Click2Read.
In addition, 'Organised Sound' journal (Cambridge University Press) recently published the second of two thematic issues on 'Sound, Listening and Place', edited by Katharine Norman. See Volume 16 and Volume 17. A collection of editorials and papers by Katharine Norman available online.
A Week of Sound and Silence Project. London sound artist Kiki Karydi, who reported in the March-April WFAE newsletter on her week at the 2012 World Soundscape Corfu conference, has continued to update her web site documenting the sonic, visual and intellectual aspects of the event in combination with the acoustic and visual beauty of the island. Click2Read-Listen-Screen
