How are we all doing, AudioSpaces friends? There’s been some delicious sun in London in recent times, which I’ve been loving but also suffering in equal measure for all the work that piles up in the background while being on grass. Life is hard!!
Luckily the deep reflection that putting this newsletter together always asks for, where all the goings on with the project have to be considered, has injected a bit of well-needed meaning into my week. Let’s start today with the most important thing, then, as usual: what’s been happening on the map?
AudioSpace(s) of the month
All discipline has been lost now with regards to how many of these we include each month. There’s just too much to mention. This is just a tiny selection, it should be said, of the countless contributions we had during April. Anyway, I hope you enjoy listening to them as much as I have been.
The main thing that can be heard from April is that lots of you are having fun, which is a very Nice Thing. Laughter by rivers or seafronts, in music rehearsals, at home playing the crossword. Strings and percussion on Atlantic islands and ships docked in Canary Wharf. We also can hear what sounds like our first recording of adhān (call to prayer) in Istanbul.
Big warm welcomes to all you new contributors as well, especially those of you who joined us this month from Korea and Japan.
Korean traditional market (Gwan-ak)
by minyou
Exhibition setup in progress…
by zen
Lobio, Khinkali, and групповое пение
by bourdeau
failed attempt at rodrigo third movement
by kač
A Call - Jonathon Ng (poem)
by jody
Marseille collection by Mat Eric Hart
We were super happy to finally collaborate with Mat, also known here on Substack as Sonic Tapestries. Mat generously shared some of his vibrant recordings from the city of Marseille and its surroundings in a special AudioSpaces collection that you can explore right now.
We were also lucky enough to have a fairly in-depth chat with him about the collection and his artistic practice more generally, with some valuable insights and advice I’m sure many of our contributors will appreciate. In return Mat asked Oliver and me some questions, too, about our thoughts behind AudioSpaces.
This isn’t the last time we’ll be sharing stuff from Mat, and we’ve actually got something else already in the pipeline. In the meantime, make sure to check out both of these posts, the collection, and give Sonic Tapestries a subscribe if you haven’t already!
Listening to trees
One of Mat’s Marseille recordings is captured from inside a pine tree, a fascinating idea which resonates with another great project that has been doing the rounds recently.
arboreus.earth is a growing collection of “sonic portraits” from trees around the world, founded by Australian artist Kim V. Goldsmith. If you’re wondering what exactly a sonic portrait of a tree might be, here it is in her own words:
Each soundtrack captures sounds influenced by the biophony, geophony and even anthropophony of the environments these trees live within, as well as their inner worlds—from the top of their leafy canopies to roots plunging deep into the soil. From remote locations to those trees that live close beside us, each is shaped by its wider environment, the climate and weather on the day it was recorded, its age and history—somewhat like us. No two species will sound the same, nor will two trees of the same species.
Hear the inner rumbles, crackles, clicks, groans, and gurgles, the wind rattling or whispering through canopies, creaking branches, and sounds of those species that call these trees and forests home. Some tracks on the site are single-source sounds of one part of the tree or its environment using a single microphone, others are more complex, multi-track mixes using different microphones or recordings taken over time. As you’ll hear, there is no one way to record the sounds of trees!
This is part of a sprawling umbrella of Goldsmith’s ecoacoustic activities compiled on ecoPULSE.art, which is full of examples of creative ways to engage with the natural world—using not just field recordings but also audio narratives, contact mics, LiDAR, maps and even thermometers.
This tree archive is especially exciting, though, because submissions seem to be indefinitely open to any arboreal sonic portrait that follows a short list of guidelines. When I’m done moping about inside, I might go out and record my own. Maybe you should too!
Remembering Jonathan Sterne
This was actually in late March, but I was sad to read on some listserv about the death of Jonathan Sterne. The sound studies pioneer is someone who has an outsized influence on everything you’ll find written on this Substack. Even only a couple days before his well-(self)documented battle with cancer came to an end, when we were preparing for our trip to Seoul, I was going on about how much of a legend Jonathan Sterne was. I wouldn’t usually write a tribute to someone I’ve never met in real life, but it does feel like a real loss for the wider community of thought and practice of which I feel AudioSpaces is a part.
Sterne was a respected teacher, writer and artist, among other things. For me personally, his importance lies with books like The Audible Past and MP3: The Meaning of Format—not to mention editing the Sound Studies Reader, which I’m sure will continue to spark many, many PhD projects for some time, and then with Lisa Gitelman the mind-bending book series Sign, Storage, Transmission.
I think I’ll have to leave it to a separate post to explain why these have all been so important to my (like so many others) thinking, not just about sound and audio, but also media, music, technology, the senses, the body, and the way all of the above are shaped by peculiar ideas, objects and activities.
Beyond his ideas, Sterne’s actual writing was always lucid and demystifying, but extremely generous and enjoyable to read at the same time. His books unpack common assumptions in a way that can turn reality a bit upside down, showing how seemingly normal, natural things are in fact really weird and historically formed. But he always managed to do this in way that was unusually clear and measured, sort of modest and often amusing.
From what people who knew him personally seem to say, this generosity that comes through in his work was a reflection of his general character. Someone to draw inspiration from in more ways than one, then. If you want to hear from people who actually knew the guy, Mack Hagood’s Phantom Power podcast has a commemorative episode and A Closer Listen wrote a tribute to him.
Anyway, have a nice rest of the week xx