Audio Postcards is a Canadian online sound exhibition curated by the Canadian Association for Sound Ecology. Project lead, Carmen Braden, takes us through excerpts from the 16 pieces chosen for the exhibition. The curators, Andrea Dancer and Hildegard Westerkamp, go onto explain the experience of putting this project together. Audio postcards themselves are short explorations and celebrations of places, except an audio postcard explores and celebrates the sounds not the sights. While listening to this I gained some useful ideas to implement in my project, such as doing a sound walk where I walk around the general location where I will be recording and simply listening to the commonplace noises of my chosen areas.

The Tate modern is a modern art gallery based in London. Some of the sound installations that they have displayed have provided inspiration for our idea. The Tate holds the national collection of British art from 1900 to the present day, as well as international modern and contemporary art. The Tate also displays sound art pieces that are created by amateurs, in order to allow them to display their work in a limited amount of space without charge. This helps to provide a platform for fresh and unique ideas within the art world, that may not have otherwise been discovered.

Susan Philipsz is a well known sound artist who is quite popular for doing sound recordings of her singing acapella in public spaces. She explains that reason for this is to make people more aware of their surroundings. Her voice is untrained, and so she leaves in breaths and imperfections to create a sense of intimacy between the listener and her voice.  She has reworked a variety of songs from different genres of music, including  traditional folk music, sixteenth century ballads, Nirvana and David Bowie. The themes she often uses demonstrate that she is interested in how sound can trigger memory and emotions. While each piece is unique, she explores familiar themes of loss, longing, hope and return. Philipsz has been interviewed regarding her themes and has been quoted as saying “Sound is materially invisible but very visceral and emotive. It can define a space at the same time as it triggers a memory“.

Philipsz’s sound pieces have been heard in spaces unusual for sound installations such as alleyways, underpasses, public bus stations and supermarkets. She likes to use spaces such as these because although it is not a normal setting for a sound installation, they are places where the noises are part of the everyday sounds that get tuned out and ignored by most people.

She currently has a sound installation at the Tate Modern, but she has also shown her work internationally. For example, she has had previous works shown in Berlin and Norway.  Even though she has had her installations appear in galleries, Philipsz believes that by placing audio pieces in an urban environment, she is able to more closely observe spaces around us and how changing the sound of different areas can impact them. This interest in exploring a geographic location, and the effect it has on our emotions and behaviour, is known as psycho-geography.

Philipsz has explained that there are two ways to experience her work in a public space. People can happen upon it and they’re surprised. They, as a result, may become very aware of their sense of self in that particular place and moment. Or, they may be aware of the installation and wait in anticipation. In doing this, Philipsz noted that they become more aware of the time passing.

This artist has inspired us due to the uniqueness of her ideas and the ways in which she has executed them. While researching her and her work, we were able to focus on the idea of making our audience more aware of the sounds that they hear everyday.

Susan Philipsz (Above)

After the guest lecture with Jez Riley French, I felt inspired to attempt something similar and create a sound piece based on listening to what we miss in every day life, within our personal environment. Before I began I felt that I should do more research on Jez Riley French and his work.

French has done a lot work within the Sound Art industry including photography, photographic scores, film, and various sound installations. He also does lectures and workshops throughout the year. He has published books, released CDs and builds his own microphones which he sells.  His recent work includes commissions for Tate Modern from the UK, Artisphere in the USA and for organisations throughout Italy, Spain, Iceland, and Japan.

Over the last few years he has been working on recordings of surfaces and spaces, both natural and man made. French is often associated with developing extended recording techniques, including the recording of structural vibrations via contact microphones recording ultra and infra-sonics. His most recent work involves recording dolomites dissolving, ants eating fallen fruit, the Tate Modern building itself vibrating, the infrasound of domestic spaces around the world, glaciers melting (global warming is real) in Iceland, and tonal resonances of natural and human objects in landscapes around the world.

His current works include:

• ‘Audible silence’ – Recordings of empty architectural spaces and structural vibrations.
• ‘Instamatic’ & ‘Emplacment’ – Single point field recordings.
• ‘Teleferica’ – Documentation of fascinating structures across Italy.
• ‘Movere’ – A series of pieces composed of field recordings, both passive and involving interactions with spaces and objects.
• ‘Adagios’ – Re-scoring of musical fragments as durational works, recorded using the building structures as filters.
• ‘Dissolves’ – Hydrophone recordings exploring the hidden sonic structures of minerals.
• ‘Scores for Listening’ – Photographic scores for listening, with visual cues for listening.