Talking field: listening to the troubled site

Budhaditya Chattopadhyay

This exposition examines my recent multi-channel sound composition 'Decomposing Landscape' (2015), inquiring into the complex, nebulous, and evolving relationship between sound and site that is thoroughly challenged in the practice of phonography or field-recording-based sound artworks dealing with environmentally troubled sites. Phonography-based compositions and sound artworks are developed through location-aware listening and field recordings made at specific sites and landscapes. The compositional strategy in these works relies on artistic interventions through the intricate processes of field recording and processing of recognisable environmental sounds using multi-channel spatialisation techniques. The artistic transformation renders these sounds into a blurry area between compositional abstraction and a portrayal of their site-based origins. The question is, how much spatial information is retained and how much abstraction is deployed in these sound artworks? A discussion of this work sheds light on some approaches and a methodology of handling site-specific evidence in sound art production.

The conclusion

The process of artistic transformation in field-recording-based sound artworks using multi-channel compositional techniques reproduces field recordings from a climatically troubled site within an augmented environment, formulating its narrative diegesis by operating between an abstraction from and reproduction of its sited source. The degree of artistic transformation depends on the amount of spatial information retained from the unedited field recordings as well as the processing that is deployed. The resulting tension may help involve attention of the audience members, who might not otherwise lend their ears to a purely documentary representation of the site. I would like to underscore this tension between offering an evidential account, through the use of unedited and relatively unprocessed field recordings, and an abstraction of ambient sounds, brought in through technology-based artistic interventions and transformation. In my assessment as a sound artist and researcher, this inherent tension makes such works more engaging.

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