Drawing Sounds. Making Sounds
Detail from Sonic Landscapes collage
Making Sounds
I have always enjoyed playing with sounds, harmonising my voice with the microwave, tapping out rhythms on the table and beatboxing to myself when no one was around. I used to take a harmonica with me whenever I went travelling somewhere, and whenever I felt confident enough, I would get it out and play. Over the over the last couple of years I have become increasingly interested in working with sound, both in terms of making music as well as thinking about how I could incorporate sound into my visual art practice.
Not long before the start of the pandemic, I gifted myself a copy of Ableton and a MIDI controller, and borrowed an audio recorder. I was curious to explore mixing and layering sounds in a similar way to how I mix and layer paint. I wanted to use recordings of everyday sounds as a raw material, as if they were the pigment in a paint, to play the rhythms and melodies that I could hear inside my head. Whilst visiting my partner’s parents in Italy, I recorded some sounds from in and around their house; the sound of a creaky bathroom door, jangling keys and the clicks and whirs from machinery at a nearby factory. I wanted to capture the textures of the place I was in and then re-mix and re-imagine them as something else. By experimenting with my recordings and watching various YouTube tutorials, I figured out how to do things like turn birdsong into a baseline, a knock on a table into a kickdrum and a bottle of water into a gong. I am interested in the notion that a piece of music like this could be considered as site-specific, in the sense that it is not only inspired by being somewhere, but literally made of a place. I entitled my first track Troubled Stone Factories, as a reference to the what3word address of one of the recordings.
Drawing Sounds
Detail from Sonic Landscapes Collage
The idea of using a site as a source to create something is really at the heart of my practice. I am fascinated by the idea that something that has its own visual or experiential elements, can be transformed into something else entirely. Likewise by the fact that that transformation into an abstraction of the original, can be interpreted in multiple ways by different people. My recent project “Sonic Landscapes” explored how people’s experience of sonic environments could be captured through drawing. Through an open call, I invited people around the world to participate in my project by drawing the sounds around them with their eyes closed. I asked participants to tune in to the textures and rhythms of what they could hear, and to capture their perceptions of the sounds by making interpretive marks on paper. It was up to the participants to decide how to make their drawings, my only instruction was that they should try to avoid pictorial representations. (i.e., rather than drawing a sketch of a bird if they hear birdsong, they were to translate the sound on paper with marks.) Alongside the drawing I also asked participants to make an audio recording, either whilst they were drawing, or alternatively first to make a recording and then draw whilst listening back to the recordings on headphones – whichever option they felt more comfortable doing.
I then used images of people’s drawings and recordings to make an audio-visual collage consisting of a digital zoomable collage of the drawings, alongside an accompanying soundtrack. I arranged the drawings by connecting shapes, patterns and textures so that they would flow as seamlessly as possible into each other. I wanted the lines and textures in the drawings to appear as though they could be roads, contour lines and geographical features on a map.
The audio collage part of the work serves as a narrative for the image, proposing a possible journey through the map. It consists of sounds from both natural and urban environments such as waves, birds, bees, wind blowing through trees, car traffic, sirens, a ticking boiler, a barking dog, rain outside the window and the scribbling of a pencil. To make the audio work, I filtered samples down to their transients to create rhythms patterns based on clicks, scratches pops and bumps in the recordings. I created drum racks from percussive sounds and synth pads from more resonant sounds. I then worked with delays, reverbs, resonators and time warping to manipulate and enhance the sounds.
The piece in totality is an example of imaginative participatory mapping. Rather than a depiction of a place, or indeed places, it is a re-imagining of a collection of imaginings. It has its origins in reality, but it has been transformed into a fantasy world. Whilst listening to the soundtrack, viewers can explore the map and create their own journey, connecting the dots and imagining where they might be and where they might go next.
Detail from Sonic Landscapes Collage
Live Sound
To take this project further, I developed a live version of the sound piece with looping samples that I could trigger and effects that I could manipulate while on stage. I performed this work live for the first time at Pri’s Art Salon in June, and it gave me such a rush that I really want to continue developing work in this direction. I feel like I have started a new chapter that celebrates the interdisciplinary nature of my work as an artist. Rather than trying to merge the various strands of my practice, I have created a totally new thing which I hope in turn will help to draw further connections between the conceptual aspects of my painting work and my participatory mapping projects. I am currently working on a couple of tracks using the Sonic Landscapes samples, and I aim to produce a mini EP. In the meantime, I am excited to say that I am going to have my first track released! Troubled Stone Factories is going to be released on vinyl as part of a compilation by Erbium Records this August which is now available to buy.
