Both J. Riley and H. Westerkamp’s examples above induce a feeling of calm using soft-spoken voices and inviting soundscapes. Their use of textures creates a safe environment for the listener to reflect on what is being transmitted. It seems that Riley takes the trope of Eno’s ambience as a non-authoratitive music to help nudge the audience further into a state of introspection. The ‘searching microphone’ is used by both artists to reveal and amplify certain sounds. Riley finds the inner sound of trees while barnacle sounds serve as a backdrop to Westerkamp’s dreams. These ‘tiny voices’ as Westerkamp describes them, draw our ears more deeply into the contours of sound and its colours. While listening to these, I start to experience for myself the marriage of inner and outer worlds. Both reality and imagination are combined to create a unique experience.
The textures and minute sonic details in these aural experiences evoke pleasantly curious feelings, that perhaps might initiate a journey that takes us away from our preconceptions. Combining the composer’s intent with the power of the sound materials themselves, a perfect balance is struck to achieve this. “Real World Work,” as defined by Katherine Norman:
“….can be seen as a move away from the reality, but through the reality, that frames our experience of music…..While not being realistic, real-world music leaves a door ajar on the reality in which we are situated. I contend that real-world music is not concerned with realism and cannot be concerned with realism because it seeks, instead, to initiate a journey which takes us away from our preconceptions, so that we might arrive at a changed, perhaps expanded, appreciation of reality.
I am reminded of A. Naess’ musings on an immanent god as a metaphor for ‘absolute freedom’. I interpret this as the creative aspect of the whole. The combined cooperation and realisation as a path to self-realisation. Norman’s ideas bring this notion to the soundscape composition:
…real world-music, like poetry, is impelled by a desire to invoke our internal ‘flight’ of imagination so that, through an imaginative listening to what is ‘immanent in the real’, we might discover what is immanent in us
Bibliography
Kolber, D. (2002) ‘Hildegard Westerkamp’s Kits Beach Soundwalk: shifting perspectives in real world music’, Organised Sound, 7(1), pp. 41–43. doi:10.1017/S1355771802001061.
Norman, K. 1996. Real-world music as composed listening. Contemporary Music Review 15(1): 1–27.