WITH DAVID DUNN
***image1***
SFR: What's the difference between a soundscape and a musical composition?
DD:
Well, let's see. We can frame that historically: It's expanded to be inclusive of virtually any kind of sound environment, human and non-human and has kind of an analogous status to music that photography does to the visual arts. It probably was much later in coming just based on the nature of the technology. Although there is a history of manipulation of sound that precedes all of that, that is dependent upon not actually tape recorders but phonograph records. Where composers would play with phonograph records. And people were manipulating sound in that way and re-recording the sounds onto another phonograph record. That was displaced very quickly because the medium was weak. But the idea of actually going out into the environment and recording sounds of the natural world and documenting a frame of time in the world and bringing that back has a much more recent history.
So you would compare it to documentation?
I hate that word! It's my least favorite word. The very word carries the implication that we're somehow turning the world into documents. It's a process of transportation, like bureaucratizing the natural world. The whole notion of soundscape recording, of nature sounds, has a wide spectrum. I'm sort of middle-of-the-road in many ways. I'm not a purist, there are certainly sound recordists who turn the tape on and whatever occurs is the artifact of interest. I don't really do that. I record long segments of things and I'll combine them or edit or put things together in a way that's more appropriate for the recognition that this stuff is not the natural world, that these are all actually semiotic references.
What was the impetus behind your most recent piece, "The Sound of Light in Trees?"
I've always been interested in hidden sound worlds. There are things that are part of the microcosm of our world and for the most part we go unaware. And there are many things that fall in that category not just because of size but also because of frequency range or medium…Our idea of sound is things that occur in air when in fact vast amounts of the natural world are communicating in soil or trees or water. So a few years ago when we had the latest bark beetle outbreak and we started to see the demise of the piñon, I just got curious. Particularly because of the rate of demise. It seemed to me like an awful lot of consumption, like an awful lot of something was going on. And as soon as I started reading, I realized that we're talking about creatures that are about the size of a grain of rice and they live inside a tree and colonize the layers between the outer bark and the inner xylem of the tree, a very thin layer and one that lots of things like to eat. So I got really curious and wondered if it wasn't something for me to look into. Goodness, our metaphors are even prejudiced! Something for me to listen into.
So you wanted to record the inside of a tree?
I just wanted to see what was there. I thought about the problem for awhile and invented a simple little transducer system. And it turns out that between the phloem and cambium layer is an incredible sound environment! You have this combination of the cellulose of the tree material, you've got fluid from the vascular system of the tree, so it's, like, got pitch and water within that environment and you've got air because of how the material is structured. And those combinations wind up being this just fantastic sound environment.
Your idea was that the dying trees were emitting light and sound and calling down the beetles. Did the project start out as data collection that became a soundscape, or did your work on a soundscape lead to your hypothesis?
It sort of all co-evolved in the sense that I have three agendas. The first interest is in the extraordinary diversity of sound, sound as phenomena. That's got to do with sound art both as an extension and a contradiction to the paradigm of traditional music. When these worlds are revealed, they challenge us to consider in a serious manner the possibility of intelligence resident within the natural world. It's hard not to hear these complex soundscapes and think that these are simply the machinations of unthinking, entirely instinctively driven blobs of DNA! It's a major paradigm shift that's occurring right now. It'll have huge consequences for what we are as residents on this planet. I've always been interested in exploring that larger set of questions around, what is mind? What is its boundary? Where is its locus? And the third agenda is the whole art and science interaction.
Art and science interaction?
Well, like most everybody else who is sane, I'm deeply depressed about the state of the environment, and particularly the state of global climate change. It's so evident that we are now passing through the eye of the environmental needle. When I say it's a co-evolution, it's that all of those interests run parallel at the same time and these days I only take on projects that really interest me. And those are projects which are involved with sound and the natural world, but they also have to have some kind of overt scientific content to them. I'm there collecting sounds because they're cool, and I'll use them and publish them in an aesthetic context, but at the same time I want to pay attention to the potential for scientific discovery. It's an attempt to provide an example of how artists can function as the new natural historians and can have a relationship to science, which is not trivial. I'm really interested in this idea of a renaissance of art and science collaboration in which you really see artists and field biologists walking together and doing research. The more I talk about this, the more I find a lot of receptivity in the scientific community. It's kind of a dance between metaphor and mechanisms. The two things are necessary for a complete vision of the world.
David Dunn's sound installation, "Listening to What I Cannot Hear," runs at the CCA through Aug. 26.
