NAISA Sound Byte 22 - What the Waters Told Me with Barry Truax
Interview with the pioneering electroacoustic composer and soundscape researcher Barry Truax
This episode of the radio show and podcast Making Waves features the pioneering work of composer, author and educator Barry Truax, who recently received the Order of Canada.
In an interview with host Darren Copeland, Truax shares his personal artistic history, linking his origins in computer and electroacoustic music with his role in soundscape studies and the World Soundscape Project. These strands came together in the 1990’s with his implementation of sampled sound in Granular Synthesis. They were later explored in his use of the convolution signal processing techniques that were developed by Tom Erbe for his program Soundhack. A good portion of the discussion is reserved for the 2022 piece What the Waters Told Me. Truax explains how he uses those techniques to transform the sounds of water into sounds that are latent with a sense of voice and emotional resonance. The episode concludes with the full piece.
What the Waters Told Me is part of Truax’s Elemental Trilogy. The full triology will be featured in a hybrid Pride Concert on June 6 hosted by New Adventures in Sound Art. Also on that program will be a performance by Kat Estacio. Tickets for online or in-person attendance can be found here.
Barry Truax in conversation with Making Waves host Darren Copeland.
Transcript of Interview Audio
Darren Copeland - You began in computer and electrocoustic music, but you were also engaged in the Soundscape Research of the World Soundscape Project at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver. What brought you into that work at Simon Fraser?
Barry Truax - Oh, that story of the transition is actually quite interesting, and now from a perspective of 60-some-odd years ago, it’s kind of almost quaint. But the point was I had switched from an undergraduate degree at Queen’s University in physics and math to my passion, music, and it was deciding which route to take in 1969 when I graduated was a very wrenching kind of experience.
So to make a long story short, I got accepted out at UBC in Vancouver, University of British Columbia, and I came out to the coast in 1969, walked into the electronics studio that was fairly primitive, and this is the voltage control synthesizer type studio of the day, Buchla and Moog things, and I suddenly felt at home that the science and the music were coming together, the passion and, you might say, the intellect. And then after two years of doing that, then I looked around and there were no doctoral programs in Canada, so I went to the Institute of Sonology in Utrecht in the Netherlands, where they had courses and high-end analog studios, all with custom-based equipment, and they had just bought a PDP-15 computer.
So that opened up the whole realm of electrocoustic music and the just beginning aspects of computer music. And after two years, I had an interactive computer music composition program, and when I say interactive, I mean studio-based, not live performance-based. That would have to be wait until midi, much later. And I produced my first four-channel computer synthesized composition called The Journey to the Gods, because it was supposed to be part of a music theatre work about Gilgamesh, and it was all done with frequency modulation synthesis, because fortunately, a couple of months earlier, John Chowning visited Sonology, and wanted to look at what I was doing and said, well, there’s this better way, called FM.
So he sketched it out for me on a proverbial piece of paper, and two months later, I had a real-time version of it, monophonic, admittedly, monophonic. Years later, he told me that that was the first real-time FM, because, of course, it only became famous later, not just the Stanford work, that he hadn’t even published yet in ‘73, but that came, and his pieces, Turenas and the others. But it came to the Synclavier and the Yamaha DX7, and all of these to suddenly bring this into the modern world.
So that was a happy happenstance. And then, at the end of the two years, when I finished and published, etc., etc., and I sent letters back to Vancouver, to University of British Columbia, and to SFU, and the one that went to SFU ended up on the desk of Murray Schafer, a famous Canadian composer, and he wrote me back, actually, to much to my surprise, UBC didn’t, and said, we’re only doing the world’s most important work here in studying the acoustic environment. Would you like to join us? Okay, here I am, 26 years old, right? And I’ve now got a Master’s degree and the equivalent of a Doctoral degree, except they didn’t give out awards. But anyway, I was starting to establish professional presence, not to mention the fact that the teaching brought me into contact with psychoacoustics and other contemporary aspects of signal processing and things like that. So it had really expanded my repertoire.
So going from the studio outdoors in Utrecht, to the noisy streets in the Centrum there, and starting to listen the way Schafer assumed, because that was the only thing I kind of knew about what he was really about, was it was about listening in the environment and an alternative to noise. Well, there was so much noise outside, and of course, here we are using our ears for what was then high-end audio indoors. So I started doing some sound walks along the canal streets and so on.
And again, in the summer of 73, I came back to Simon Fraser University to join Murray. They were already putting the publishing touches, finishing touches on the Vancouver Soundscape. They had done all the fieldwork, and they were going to create the booklet and two LPs. And in my spare time, I got access to a computer in the psychology department and reinstalled my computer composition approach. So at that time, those two things were completely divorced from each other. Yes, I tried to title pieces Sonic Landscapes, you know, but they were synthesized. But it was the first four-channel version of that.
So it took until the 90s before we started being able to use enough sampled sound, as we would call it now, environmental sounds in longer and longer recordings, to actually start to integrate soundscape composition with computer music composition. And that’s, again, in a nutshell, how this interdisciplinary approach.
And of course, academically, I started teaching in the School for Communication, which is a Social Science program, and Schafer left in 1975 rather abruptly, and suddenly I was his successor in teaching acoustic communication and electroacoustic communication in both studio and in the theoretical aspects to give a little broader and deeper framework, intellectual framework for soundscape studies, which up to that point had been fairly descriptive.
So all of those came together, you know, within like a 10-year period of it, and I’m forever grateful that that actually happened, due to, you know, influences such as Schafer, Chowning and Otto Laske for instance, and other people along the way.
Darren Copeland - Could you describe how the soundscape research was informing those pieces - you referred to a sonic landscape - but did they inform the structure or other aspects of the composition?
Barry Truax - Oh yes, because we were producing audio documents at the same time, right? As I mentioned, the Vancouver soundscape, which had the two LPs, and most of that was just simply representations that were just recordings that were edited up and put together what we would now call a phonographic approach, that is documentary type of approach. But then after the first major tour, the cross Canada tour in the fall of 73, the next year Schafer got a commission from CBC, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, for their Ideas program, which was actually fortunately stereo, at that point because it was on the FM network, for a series of 10 one-hour radio programs.
So they were called Soundscapes of Canada, and they formed, as I analyzed later, a kind of a range, a kind of demonstration of the range of approaches that soundscape composition could take from those that were collectively done, just like the Vancouver Soundscape, there are no quote, authors of that or composers of that, to things that might be more didactic or documentary. There was one approach that Bruce (Davis) did about a documentary about foghorns and other signals and sound marks. And then there was, at the other extreme, there was a 24-hour field recording of the summer solstice at a pond out in the Fraser Valley, from midnight to midnight, that we did in 15-minute sections.
And we edited two minutes out of each quote hour and put those together into a radio program with very minimal commentary, which was unusual for radio at that point. It was just the time. It’s four minutes to 1 a.m., for instance.
That was the only commentary, and we transparently edited. And then in between those two approaches, the individual composers and many of the Schafer’s research assistants, either had musical training or were experimenting in the studio, created our own compositions with the soundscape material.
So that formed the bridge right there, and then, if we fast-forward to 1996, when we did the second Vancouver Soundscape, we had new DAT recordings, digital audio tape recordings of Vancouver, and we brought in two Canadian composers, yourself being one of them and Claude Schryer being the other, and of course two German composers who had been typically associated with the radio, not the avant-garde scene. They had no idea. The avant-garde Europeans had no idea about this. They couldn’t understand it. But the radiophonic people, Sabine Breitsameter and Hans-Ulrich Werner, they were invited with the aid of the Goethe Institute, of course, to come and use the soundscape materials.
And just at that time, we were developing with my engineering friend, Tim Bartoo, of Harmonic Functions, we were developing computer-controlled diffusion for eight-channel output. And before that, we were just using quad or stereo. But we had this opportunity to spatialize these environmental sounds and their compositions into eight channels. And that is what has developed now over the last - more than 20 years. It’s almost 30, really, now, to have very complex simulations of realistic and abstracted sonic environments, including totally imaginary ones. So that was a very key technical development. And we actually developed it more for environmental sounds rather than the traditional acousmatic diffusion practices, which I can talk about, but that gets kind of technical. They were doing something similar, but not particularly reproducing a realistic environment. It was an abstract space, not a more realistic space.
Darren Copeland - I think that there is this point where the two come together between your electroacoustic music and your soundscape research, how those came together through, not just your granular synthesis, but more recently in the work that you’ve been doing in the past 10, 15 years -
Barry Truax - But there again, the granular synthesis was interesting because looking back on it, it was the piece called River Run that has become, I’m very pleased to say, known everywhere and received the Magisterium Award at Bourges in 91, I think it was. And it’s also been completely documented and reproduced in the Oxford volume Inside Computer Music, along with a piece of my colleague, Hildegard Westerkamp, Beneath the Forest Floor. So this work has been given quite a bit of attention.
And because River Run was the first one to be done with real-time granular synthesis entirely, it was kind of a landmark piece as well as being this huge kind of sound experience. Initially in quad, because we didn’t have enough eight-channel recorders to make an eight-channel version, but then in the 2000s, I managed to salvage the tapes, all of which had been generated in eight channels, and not mixed them down to a quad. And now the eight-channel version is the one.
But often I use this as an example of a soundscape composition in my published list of characteristics. The use of environmental sounds was not one of the principles of it. Obviously, it is frequently done, they are frequently done with environmental sounds. But River Run is an interesting case because you can listen to it as if it were a river from its source, droplets that start like pixels building up, grains building up, through to massive textures that in British Columbia are reminiscent of Hell’s Gate Canyon, and then broadening out to a very reflective and steady-state Delta region, if you want to use that metaphor, and then a little evaporation at the end. You can listen to it as if it were a soundscape. Even though not a single sound is realistic and would never be confused for a real recording of water, and yet the metaphor is there.
So again, if it’s very different what ears you listen to it in, and to try to make it plausible and understandable to a general audience, I kept the form simple, five sequences that went through this pattern and borrowed the term from James Joyce, River Run, from Finnegan’s Wake, so the dynamic aspect of it. And people bought into it. The public has always really, really appreciated the sound and it made sense to them. A 20-minute piece of synthetic music, if you wanted to look at it that way, that they could extrapolate and gave them just enough to hold on to, to use Leigh Landy’s famous term, to actually make sense. So the soundscape is not just a way of listening, it’s also a way of positioning yourself.
And now with eight channels we position people, and multiples of eight channels, I hasten to add, we position the listener within a plausible, if abstracted, sound space.
Darren Copeland - Right, right. And creating that kind of complexity that we commonly hear in the environment, so spatial complexity. River Run is still, like a portrait of nature, you could say. At what point did it shift for you from that to, say, working with more realistic representations of nature? And was that a goal, actually, to make it realistic? Or is it still, even with soundscape recordings, still a poetic response to nature that’s guiding the principle of your work?
Barry Truax - Well, it always was all of the above, you know, with the project and with the individual composers. That’s why I mentioned the Soundscapes of Canada, because it had all of those elements from documentary to poetic to abstracted, and even I did a kind of sound object study in there as well. And oral history was very, very important, the whole range of sounds. So we had been using those, but all in the analog domain.
So it really was limited at that point, I’m talking about the 70s and 80s, to buy the technology we had available. So to use long bits of these recordings and digitally process them into the eight channels, that’s what happened in the 90s, right? So that brought it into a different dimension. You could say it sort of integrated all of the above, but it was really a continuation, but it was marked by an inflection point where going to digital samples, and I’m talking about long ones, for a while I was just limited to phonemes.
And my piece, well, yeah, but my piece, Wings of Nike, you know, there’s 12 minutes and it’s based on two phonemes, and each one of those last 170 milliseconds. I think it was a pretty good output to input ratio, actually.
Darren Copeland - So a tenth of a second.
Barry Truax - Yeah, yeah, even less than that, a third. Or about at least a third of a section. There was some synthetic material added, but 90% of the piece was done.
But it was done in four channels and then later in all eight channels with a visual accompaniment by my colleague Theo Goldberg.
So there were various integration points along the way, but the electroacoustic music approach then could be integrated quite fully within the full resources of multi-channel audio and computer-controlled composition and diffusion and processing. So, for instance, granular time-stretching that then came out of granular synthesis, really just the next year or so. First with those phonemes that I just mentioned, and then in 1990 a piece called Pacific where I went from phonemes to the entire ocean, right, you know, without a hint of irony, mainly based on time-stretching.
So the early pieces then it could integrate it with taking a small amount of sampled sound, not phonemes, and stretching them digitally without changing their pitch. Now, I did that with granulation and a certain degree of random variation, whereas time-stretching in the editing commercial world just simply repeats the sound, repeats the samples. So you get precision in that, but you can’t do a stretch greater than four or eight or ten times without hearing the modulation effect, the modulation artifact.
What they do, and I use these things if you only want to stretch something by a little bit, it’s amazing from a programming point of view because I’ve tried it, it’s actually amazing that they can do it without any artifacts.
But I like artifacts that add texture. So granular time-stretching then blurred the sound but also made that you could listen inside the sound and emphasize the spectral structure, the actual frequency structure of it by instead of balancing that with the time domain you stretch the time domain, and suddenly you’re inside the sound and you’re hearing all the micro-level variations to it, because environmental sound is incredibly complex at the micro-level, but we haven’t had very strong methods of getting at that and controlling that. That’s a technical issue that maybe we don’t go into, but from a listening point of view, it completely changed. For instance, when I started stretching the bells that we recorded in Quebec City from Notre-Dame de Québec, and the stretching of the bells started enlarging the resonances of the acoustic space to the point where I felt I was inside the Church, not just inside the bell.
And so I formed a piece called Basilica which would then simulate going into the Church and its acoustics would be created by, in fact, only the stretching of the bell sounds themselves plus some transpositions for that. So that was a very exciting moment to be able to, for instance, just do that kind of work that was impossible to do in the analog domain.
Darren Copeland - I remember you talking about - years ago - drawing out from water sounds a choral or vocal-like quality, and then from voice sounds a sense of an environment. It’s as though that perhaps there’s a continuum between the human voice and the natural world. You seem to be touching on those ideas.
Barry Truax - Yes, actually that’s an important question because it points to, as I think you’re intending, the current trilogy of pieces that takes this to another level.
So when I talked about the sort of vocal-like sounds coming out of just time-stretching, that was basically because there were only resonance regions that were being momentarily stretched and becoming audible in that case. So to jump ahead to the present, then this Elemental Trilogy of pieces that starts with What the Waters Told Me took this into the micro-level domain in a way that I had not done before and I’m not sure anyone had done before. So, as you’re kind of implying, the impetus for this or the history of this had already been established 20 or 30 years ago, just using your ears and particularly the granular time-stretching, hearing internal resonances, but of course they were sustained. You know, it wasn’t phonemes or anything like that. And of course, the reason psychoacoustically is really clear. Our whole auditory system is built in the analysis of spectra to hear these spectral peaks that are, of course, the essence of vowels.
So it’s the basis of language and the basis, one of the bases of the auditory system itself. And historically, people hearing voices in complex sounds, including bells, a famous quote of Leonardo, hearing voices, vocal-like things in bells, for instance, quoted by Schafer. This has been around for a long time, so it shows that it’s not just a compositional thing. It’s part of our way of listening.
So the implication today, though, is slightly different, I think, or maybe it’s just clarified, which is that these pieces, The Elemental Trilogy, are deliberately trying to blur the distinction between the human and the natural world, to blur that distinction, and not just blur, but blur or challenge the apparent hierarchy that we as humans egocentrically think, well, we’re more important. I’m only being slightly facetious here, because, in fact, it has to do with ecology and the domination of nature concepts that go back to the Enlightenment.
And often, just without thinking about it, we, you know, because speech and music are so endemic to our culture as the oral expressions of it, and everything else is what could be reduced to sound effects, you know, at least in the film world, right? We do tend to value, not surprisingly, the human, but we also give a priority, and that is, I think, symbolic of the situation we’re in today, where we are trying to become more aware of how the anthropocene, the actual impact of human activity, is challenging and even destroying and certainly degrading the environment in a way that is, well, first of all, not consistent with Indigenous cultures, for instance, we’re becoming painfully aware of that. But also, what could it mean for composers? Well, there’s no one simple answer. I’m hoping younger people in particular will find many answers.
But in terms of my history, then this cycle of pieces was motivated by trying to blur that distinction and not give it priority, and yet at the end of each of the pieces, I deliberately, as I do in many of my works, try to go for a transcendence of the divide and to integrate it, and even dare I say, to create what I’m now calling the aural sublime. So something that is beyond the human.
So it’s not just saying, okay, we’re going to just listen to environmental sounds and appreciate them maybe better, which, of course, a lot of soundscape composition is doing. But I’m also ambitiously trying to integrate the voice to bring the voices out of the natural world and to listen to them and to explore them even if it’s in an abstracted way, but ultimately to integrate them back into a more transcendent human experience.
So the technical way that this happens, for the geeks out there, for people who want, is that I’ve been doing hybridization of sound for many years now using the convolution technique. Which very simply and non-technically multiplies the spectra of two different sounds together.
So it can only work in a hybrid when those two sounds have some frequencies in common. But when you do that with natural sounds, say like water and that, if you convolve everything in the one water sound with everything in the second water sound, you just get a blur. Basically a kind of weird ambience, but it’s just simply whitewash across the aural spectrum.
So eventually I decided, and given the previous discussion about the microsound level and granular synthesis, I decided to use a moving window so that you would only convolve a bit of, you’d only convolve the original sound with a bit of the second sound. And then the next bit, and the next bit, and the next bit. So you would take these micro-level windows, and when they were at a phonemic level, which again I hadn’t done before, they were now in the, say, 100 to 200 millisecond, which is the duration of a phoneme, would vocal-like material come out? And of course it did immediately. And I can give you an illustration of that later.
So it came from a technical exploration, which actually, many of the works that I’ve done, it doesn’t make for great program notes, although it’s pretty good for academic papers. But sometimes it comes out of pure research into the sounds.
And in this case, it has a broader implication. I’m publishing now a paper in the Computer Music Journal, the venerable journal that I started off with in the 70s, for soundscape composition and micro-sound. And that’s the key element there, is that environmental sound has to be understood at the micro-level of it.
But for the listener, it means that then the kind of normal psychocoustic processes that we use in listening, say to voice, then are employed just at this level of turning environmental sounds into vocal-like material. Not words, but vocal-like material.
Darren Copeland - Why don’t we hear some examples?
Barry Truax - Yeah, sure.
Okay, well, let’s just go with What the Waters Told Me. This is 2022. And then afterwards I can mention, you know, the other two compatriots to it.
All right, so this was all done with water sounds. So some of them were a kind of dripping water. [plays example of dripping water]
And the other was a much broader creak sound, [plays example of creak sound] and then when the two were hybridized together using this technique, all these phonemes started coming out of them, and they were almost scary at the beginning like these ones. [plays example of hybridized version] And then an octave lower. [example lowered by one octave]
So it was a completely different experience of water in that sense. And then to have some contrast, I also used splashing sounds from a well that I had used in the piece called Island. [plays example of splashing sound in well] Or things like that that would be a little more discreet. And then they also kept some formant qualities in those sounds as well. [plays example of well with a formant quality]
Those tracks are combined together there in that little demo. And to go a little bit further then, I said that we’re not trying to eliminate the human, but in the transition, I used a female formant that I had used in the Chalice Well piece that had already abstracted to simply the female type of resonance. [plays example of female voice resonance]
And so later in the piece, you start to hear those kinds of sounds coming out into the water sound itself, such as... [plays hybridized example] And then for the ending, to try to put all of this together and create a union and a transcendence, if I can use that term, I did actually use this as the only place other than the female formant, which was already abstracted, where I used actual human sounds. So these are two choral cadences recorded in the Salzburg Cathedral. [plays example of choral cadence] And… [plays second example of choral cadence] And when they were combined with the water, then we get a beautiful mingling of the human and the natural. [plays hybridized example]
And then over top of that, I add in an actual very delicate wave recording from the original Vancouver Soundscape (album). In fact, it’s the opening track on the Vancouver Soundscape. These really bright close-up waves on a sandy beach. And there’s something quite magical about all of that coming together at the very end, in a kind of grand sort of texture.
Darren Copeland - So it’s kind of like, in a way, you’re manipulating things at some kind of almost genome-like level of taking these little seeds of sound, as opposed to montaging full recordings together.
Barry Truax - Yes. It’s working from within the sound, is one way that I talk to it.
Walter Branchi, the Italian composer and philosopher, in translation, talks about not just working with sound, but through sound or in sound. And it also just has a different kind of – it opens up as much as – in other words, you’re not just manipulating raw material in this kind of manufacturing metaphor, that we use all the time, production and mastering and distribution and all that.
And the language doesn’t really help us, but I found that these little prepositions that working in or through sound gives it more of an interactive perspective that we are – or as Tim Ingold says, sound is not what we hear, but what we hear in.
We hear in sound, right? And so I love that phrase. In fact, the older I get the more I like these little tiny prepositions, because they change the relationship. They change the relationship. And it does capture something that is often becomes too static in actual language with subjects and actioning and nouns.
Darren Copeland - What are your expectations for how a listener listens to the piece? Is this a medium through which they can swim with their imagination?
Barry Truax - It is a medium through which they swim. And I don’t mean for them to start thinking about these theories that I’ve been explaining to you. That’s for later or for people who are curious.
No, but just as I found with Riverrun or with the Soundscape materials, like back in the 70s, just replaying actual Vancouver recordings to Vancouverites was a completely different experience for them. It was the novelty of the ordinary, you might say, right? Because they had never focused on them before.
They were just, oh, those are Vancouver sounds. So the whole Soundscape approach is to listen to the familiar, right? But then as you start composing, you start moving into other dimensions. Often the processing is like going into memory or metaphor or symbolism or something else. But the first-time listener(s) have told me in many cases that they participate in the work more, because they’re bringing their own environmental experience that they’ve been developing, whether they hone it or not aware of it or whatever they do for their entire lives, right? We understand a fair amount about how listening and psychocoustics and environmental sound works, right? And not just as raw material, right? So you’re invoking something that is there. And then once you add references to context, environmental context, and what we share or what would be idiosyncratic or individual, then they start to participate in the process more. Not just, oh, it reminds me of… right? Fill in the blanks… Composers often put those things into program notes. And so I was inspired by, you know, a vacation, a novel, a poem, whatever. Everybody’s inspired by the real world. And believe me, composers need inspiration. But you can listen to the work totally without knowing any of that. It doesn’t actually explain the word or augment it. Whereas with a soundscape composition, then we deliberately try to evoke what is already in people’s experience and minds, right, and let them play.
Just as we do in real time with soundwalking. A soundwalk is a real-time composition, as you well know, and many of your listeners know, it’s so pervasive, right, that you are actually choosing what to listen to, how to listen to it, and how long, and you’re noticing the spatial aspects of it. And moving then to another place is the increased tension or less, and then maybe a cadence or repose at the end. It is very much real-time composition where composing, performing, and listening are all together. They’re all one and the same.
So these soundscape compositions, they try to build on that. And when people ask me, with students, how to start, I don’t say start recording. I say start listening via soundwalk. Just sound walk right first. And then you’ll expand your horizons about what’s worth recording, and then you can get involved in all the technical stuff and what you’re going to do with it.
But the results are much better when the soundscape and the listening process has been honed into the complexity of the real world, which is not always satisfying aesthetically, right? But that also, as Schafer pointed out, oh, well, maybe now you’ll try to do something about it or take all this, quote, noise into consideration, right? So it could have an ameliorating effect of simply paying more attention to it.
Yeah, well, of course, there’s a lot of music exposure that people have, and obviously commercial music. But we’re not going to touch upon, you know, whether that’s good, bad, or indifferent. But it often limits people to just simply, well, this is what you listen to.
This is what you’re supposed to listen to carefully or increasingly as background, you know, accompaniment media I call it, or, you know, a surrogate soundscape, you know, people with their Walkmans and Earpods and all that kind of stuff, that’s grown out of the whole background music phenomenon of the last hundred years, right? That it limits what is worth listening to. You could say what is music, but that often devolves into something else. But what is worth listening to doesn’t usually include the environment.
And that detaches us from aspects that, in fact, are having a profound impact on people’s lives. You know, this is not just aesthetic. The sound has a 24-7 impact on everything, and we can go into, you know, the effects on the body and on sleep and communication and socialization and relating to each other.
Sound is what joins people together and things together, right? You know, and if that becomes devalued, then what are you losing? What kind of relationships are you losing? And will the surrogates, in particular the commercial surrogates, really replace that, the whole thing about social media now that’s so controversial, if it replaces it negatively?
Okay, so that was an introduction to the first piece in the Trilogy, What the Waters Told Me, and I followed it up with two other kinds of voices, methods of voices, not literally coming from in the human voice sense, but the next one was with wind, which is a very tricky topic to deal with with sound because wind only, you know, sounds, as it passes through things and is very effervescent and even treacherous or whatever, it can mean anything. But there are some connections to the voices of the wind where it teases us into thinking that there is a human element. So for instance, when wind passes through a narrow opening, we say it whistles, or it creates a resonance that we somehow think as vocal.
Also in music, there’s another little more literal type of voice which is called the Aeolian effect. When wind sets in motion a string, and the turbulence on the string gets it to sound, and so our string instruments could be activated by wind or air, as well as tubes that can have a resonance inside of them. Of course, we blow into them and call the woodwind instruments, or have a buzz that goes into them. We can activate those kind of columns. So there’s an interesting musical aspect as well as kind of a quasi-human. And we also often anthropomorphize the wind. It’s sighing or it’s howling or it’s whatever. We extrapolate onto that. And so that piece is called How the Winds Caressed Me. So it evokes the haptic aspect, not just the aural aspect of it.
And then the final piece, at least final for the moment anyway, is now turning to the Earth. And I’m interpreting that as not just sounds of the Earth, but of sounds of metal, largely metal that comes out of the Earth. And so it evokes all the things that we do with metal and construct things from Earthen materials. And it is called more dramatically When the Earth Mourned for Me. So I’m deliberately referencing the climate crisis, environmental crisis, and saying a little bit fancifully, we mourn for the Earth and the degradation that we have caused to it, but does the Earth mourn for us, who are the perpetrators of that degradation? And so it’s trying to hear voices. Again, we come back to resonances and things in it. And so the piece itself goes through four sections that are continuous.
First of all, Choir, which is bringing these voices together. And then the first Lament that starts to hint at a sorrowful aspect of it. And then what we all feel, I think, from time to time, anguish for the sheer harm that’s going on and the devastation that’s going on. And then hopefully a transcendent ending, Threnody. Threnody is a musical term for Lament for the Dead, but it’s in this case some kind of, hopefully some kind of redemption that means that we still mourn, but it achieves some kind of satisfaction or some kind of resolution for ourselves. Not that you can resolve everything, but a lament is one way. It doesn’t change the Death. It just simply reaffirms the human experience of it.
Making Waves is a monthly one hour program about radio art and sound art that is produced by New Adventures in Sound Art’s Artistic Director Darren Copeland in South River, Ontario, Canada. The show features Canadian, US, and international artists creating sound-based media art. It focuses on the techniques, processes, and motivations of the artists it features as well as individuals supporting the field through dissemination and curatorial activities. The show is a snapshot of what is happening in sound-based media art in the here and now from a northern perspective.
New Adventures in Sound Art invites you tune in on NAISA Radio to the 10th annual “slow radio” broadcast of the Wetland Project on International Earth Day (Wednesday, April 22, 2026).
Since its inauguration on Vancouver Co-op Radio in 2017, listening to the 24hour soundscape from the ṮEḴTEḴSEN marsh in W̱SÁNEĆ territory (Saturna Island, British Columbia, Canada) has grown into an Earth Day tradition heard on 60 radio stations and via the web in over 50 countries.
Artists Brady Marks and Mark Timmings invite you to fill your home, work, vehicle and leisure spaces with the resonant sounds of birds, frogs, insects and airplanes! Immerse yourself in the vitality of the 24-hour circadian rhythm of the wetland. The broadcast engages its audience in real time and stimulates a powerful re-engagement with the living environment. As the world spins through turbulent times, “slow radio” offers a life-affirming respite to reflect upon a more lucid and caring future.
Wetland Project respectfully acknowledges that its work takes place on the unsurrendered lands and waters of the W̱SÁNEĆ First Nations and within the extended territories of the Hul̓q̓umín̓um̓- and hən̓q̓əmin̓əm̓-speaking peoples.
Heartfelt thanks to recording engineer Eric Lamontagne and programmer Gabrielle Odowichuk (Limbic Media) for their enormous contributions to the project.