This year I was very happy to receive a Music Bursary award from the Arts Council of Ireland to research the musical application of bioacoustics. I’ll be studying the recordings of the Animal Sound Archive at the Berlin Natural History Museum as my primary resource, which was kindly made possible by the head of the archive Dr. Karlheinz Frommolt.
I’ve decided to begin a blog to accompany this project. I’ll be documenting the compositional work, so you can follow how that’s developing over the next few months. The main outcome is to find ways to allow bioacoustics to inform my work as a composer and performer. So I’ll be immersing myself in the morphologies of animal sounds, absorbing their character, responding to them in different musical ways.
I’ll also be keeping a record of my own thoughts about the relation between non-humans and humans. I’ll obviously be approaching the topic from the perspective of a composer, rather than a biologist or botanist. So it will be speculative, a little freewheeling I imagine, and will take a lot of its orientation from aesthetics and the humanities. Science-fiction, psychedelia and H.P Lovecraft are my initial starting points, and I’ll be posting links to relevant texts as well as my own musical works along the way…. more on that in future posts…
There is one central point of focus to this project: to de-familiarize non-human life and push to the fore the uncanniness of other beings. There is a tendency to try and bridge the rift between humans and non-humans, to show how similar we are, and base some form of ethics on this. I’m not sure this is the best way to develop a deeper relationship with non-human life. Maybe we should be more sensitive to the fact that we humans share a cosmic living space with strangers, whose life worlds are radically different to ours, on a different plane of being altogether.
So, for this project I don’t want to try to bring human and non-human life closer, quite the opposite; I want to attempt to keep that rift open, point towards it, observe it, wander around its edges, throw sounds into it, record its seismic activity…