Sound Matters, a playlist of audio papers written and produced by Tim Hitman and supported by Bang and Olufsen, starts with an episode called ‘The Sound of Life Itself’.
(‘Bang & Olufsen presents Sound Matters: a series of podcasts looking at – and listening to – all the sounds of the world around us. Forthcoming instalments will investigate all kinds of sounds that happen in our noisy cosmos, how we listen to them, the stories we tell about them, and all the ideas, inventions, discoveries, possibilities and ideas that live in the realm of the audible. Written and produced by Tim Hinman and supported by Bang & Olufsen.‘)
The sonic episode, decorated with field recordings and quiet ambient music, seamlessly intertwines the presenter’s voice with pre-recorded material whilst keeping the narrative singular and cohesive. To start with, Tim Hinman cleverly sets the scene… ‘the snow all around me, at the edge of a patch of pine trees’ (somewhere in a forest in Sweden)… ‘looking for some peace and quiet’. He goes on to give some context to the scene, explaining why he’s taken these recordings – As someone that’s worked in the sound industry for around 20 years his aim was to find some sort of ‘audio ground zero’ to find out where listening begins. All of this pretexts the actual podcast, that commences with the series’ ident ‘Sound Matters’. A poetic way of setting the audience up for an exploration into how humans fit into the big picture of sound – the soundscape of planet earth.
Over a recording of Wolves in the Algonquin provincial park in Canada, Bernie Krauss, the creator of said recording and participant of episode 1’s podcast, introduces himself as a Bio-acoustician who records all forms of nature and organisms of all sizes from viruses to large whales. Starting off as a musician, he went on to work on many film scores – most famously on Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now’. We are offered an insight into Bernie Krauss’ journey in the sound industry – from musician to field recordings.
Krauss’ references to Geophony: ‘referring to the sounds of natural forces, such as water, wind, and thunder, occurring in wild, relatively undisturbed habitats‘, Biophony: ‘referring to the collective acoustic signatures generated by all sound-producing organisms in a given habitat at a given moment.’ and Anthropophony: ‘representing human generated sound from either humans, themselves, or the electro-mechanical technologies they employ’ were all accompanied with soundscapes that sonically described what area of life each definition stood for. The episode even broke down a cityscape to reveal the layers of noise found within, linking it to how industrialisation has erased our connection with the natural soundscape. The podcast deftly expands on this by fading a soundscape of a city into a soundscape of nature to portray the differences in noise pollution and tranquility between the two, allowing the audience to aurally feel the difference as opposed to gauging it off mere text.
On a side note, a thought I found very enlightening was that natural sounds have no cultural bias, unlike many of the sounds made by humans, which is why they therefore induce sounds of tranquility and calmness, as there is no agenda or meaning we can attach to them other than their form and function.
This episode of the series Sound Matters aesthetically compares multiple soundscapes in a variety of ways. Like the sound of a plane flying overhead to introduces Krauss’ voice, which not only points to the matter at hand but also builds tension and a sense of urgency in the build up to the dialogue, or the frequent backing track of sonic environments that acts a constant reminder to the spaces within a landscape and the sounds that occupy them, and even the sound of silence to represent an ecosystem that is dead or close to dying, raising our awareness of the impact of noise on nature – man made noises can interfere with habitats and how the creatures within them hear, hunt and communicate.
Overall, I feel that the sonic imagery in this podcast accompanies Hinman’s and Krauss’ dialogue in a way that helps us visualise things, allowing us to engage even more with the information provided. Poignantly so, a podcast on the importance of sound in a very visual culture – setting the theme for the rest of the series