Abstract
This chapter examines the modes of captures and production of what Raymond Ray Schafer coined ‘soundscape’ in his key 1977 monograph The Tuning of the World. Through the case studies of site-specific acoustic artworks by contemporary artists Dalziel+Scullion and Hanna Tuulikki, it endeavours to map the modes of inscription of spatialised and spatialising sounds within the scripted and the non-scripted, with a view to assessing the degree to which they participate in the revival of the romantic ideal of the total artwork, or Gesamtkunstwerk.
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- 1.
See also, as part of the British ‘hutting movement’, Tim Knowles’ Exploration Aids project (2015–2016) in Huntly. The project, ‘stimulated from discussion of common property rights’, involves building a network of temporary shelters (or ‘Howffs’) on location. http://www.deveron-arts.com/exploration-aids. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 2.
The project received financial and logistic support from Arts Council England, Nevis Landscape Partnership, Oxford Brookes University, Live Art Development Agency and Forestry Commission Scotland.
- 3.
http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/remote-performances-online. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 4.
Schafer’s Tuning of the World was republished as The Soundscape: Our Sonic Environment and the Tuning of the World in 1994.
- 5.
‘Ecology is the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environment. Acoustic ecology is thus the study of the effects of the acoustic environment or soundscape on the physical responses or behavioural characteristics of creatures living within it. Its particular aim is to draw attention to imbalances which may have unhealthy or inimical effects’ (Schafer 1977, p. 271).
- 6.
See the ‘Imagining Natural Scotland’ projects of Tim Collins and Reiko Goto (‘The forest is moving, Breadalbane’) and of Tommy Perman and Rob St. John (‘Water of life, Edinburgh’).
- 7.
A short version of Speaking the Land is now available online: http://www.dalzielscullion.com/works_page/film/speaking_video.html. Accessed 9 January 2019.
To this day, I have not been able to find the transcription of the text. The latter thus appears to be accessible only in online audio form, which is consistent with Richard Kostelanetz’s definition of ‘text-sound art’: ‘The art is text-sound, as distinct from text-print and text-seen, which is to say that texts must be sounded and thus heard to be ‘read’, in contrast to those that must be printed and thus be seen. The art is text-sound, rather than sound-text, to acknowledge the initial presence of a text, which is subject to aural enhancements more typical of music’ (Kostelanetz 1977, p. 61).
- 8.
See Jay Griffiths’ explicit references to ‘the dreamtime of the oaks’ and ‘the quest for the green man, the spirit of the woods’.
- 9.
Edwin Morgan’s holographic (and slightly tongue-in-cheek) poem ‘The Day the Sea Spoke’ immediately comes to mind. This poem is available in print in Morgan’s Uncollected Poems (1949–1982) and in audio version on the aforementioned accompanying CD to The Order of Things.
- 10.
Hanna Tuulikki, interview by the author, Edinburgh, 18 February 2015. All following quotes come from the same interview.
- 11.
‘The performance and resulting film is a work of contemporary archaeo-acoustics, utilizing natural echo-phenomena and mnemonic topographies—the land encoded in the song, the lore embedded in the land—making visible what has lain hidden and audible what has been forgotten.’ http://www.hannatuulikki.org/portfolio/women-of-the-hill. Accessed 9 January 2019.
- 12.
‘Both visual and auditory perception obviously occur in space and time, but the spatial dimension takes priority for visual signs and the temporal one for auditory signs. A complex visual sign involves a series of simultaneous constituents, while a complex auditory sign consists, as a rule, of serial successive constituents’ (Jakobson 1987, p. 469). ‘Vision: Spatial richness – Temporal poverty/Sound: Spatial poverty – Temporal richness’ (Ihde 2007, p. 65).
- 13.
In ‘A Provisional Theory of Non-Sites’, http://www.robertsmithson.com/essays/provisional.htm. Accessed 9 January 2019.
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Websites
Dalziel+Scullion. https://dalzielscullion.com/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Deveron Projects. https://www.deveron-projects.com/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Live Art Development Agency. Remote Performances. http://www.thisisliveart.co.uk/projects/remote-performances-online. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Remote Performances. http://www.remoteperformances.co.uk/ Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
Tuulikki, Hanna. http://www.hannatuulikki.org/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
———. Away With the Birds. http://score.awaywiththebirds.co.uk/. Accessed 16 Mar 2019.
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Manfredi, C. (2019). Soundmarks and Ecotones: Ensounding Scotland. In: Nature and Space in Contemporary Scottish Writing and Art. Geocriticism and Spatial Literary Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-18760-6_7
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