Sunday, April 6, 2025

Four Birds (musique concrète & modular 2024)

 

Since I was a child in the 1960s, I’ve had an interest in nature. By the time I was nine or ten, I realised something was wrong, many of the apparently common birds and insects in my nature books were nowhere to be seen. I didn’t understand then how ecologically impoverished the English countryside was compared to the previous decades when the books were written.

What I had experienced was an outcome of Shifting Baseline Syndrome. The concept is that without memory, knowledge, or experience of past environmental conditions, current generations cannot perceive how much their environment has changed because they are comparing it to their own ‘normal’ baseline and not to historical baselines.

In psychology it is referred to as ‘environmental generational amnesia’.
What we consider to be a healthy environment now, past generations would consider to be degraded, and what we judge to be degraded now, the next generation will consider to be healthy or ‘normal’. The result is our tolerance for environmental degradation increases and our expectations for the natural world are lowered.

“Four birds” explores that environmental loss through sound, taking recordings of birds, then manipulating and synthesising them as an analogy for our increasingly inaccurate memories.

Soon these natural sounds will only exist as distorted and mis-remembered fragments as our memories fade over time. At some time, we will forget their songs and finally we will forget what we forgot.

 

Recordings of Turtle Dove, Skylark, Yellow Hammer & House Martin from the British Library archive (Creative Commons Attribution 4 international licence). Other recordings are my own from 1982-2022)


Cover: Illustration of a turtle dove (Streptopelia turtur) by John Gould and Elizabeth Gould, 1832-1837 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGZuFl9hCC8


Saturday, November 16, 2024

"Feedback Occurs" (2021)

 Vocoder and physical modelling.

Apart from the vocoded text all the sounds in the piece where generated or processed using feedback loops. This included Karplus Strong tones and runaway feedback on a MXR Pitchshifter.

 


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b544st9R8DE

 

 

 

Four Birds (musique concrète & modular 2024)

  Since I was a child in the 1960s, I’ve had an interest in nature. By the time I was nine or ten, I realised something was wrong, many of...