Soundscape: Wave Crashing On Shore and Child Calling, 2021, 198 x 152cm, Pigment Print.
Soundscape: Fairy-Wren and Wave, 2021, 198 x 152cm, Pigment Print.
Bongin Bongin (Mona Vale) Basin
This project is an investigation into a specific place, Bongin Bongin (Mona Vale) Basin, a place I walk in most days. Audio recordings were made at Bongin Bongin Basin, Sydney, over several days from spring to autumn, 2021. The recordings are made through a spectrometer device that converts sound into a time-frequency diagram that shows sound as a visual representation. The spectrograms describe phenomena that was not necessarily in my field of vision yet existed as tangible expressions of my experience in the coastal landscape.
Comparing three recorded sounds; an ocean wave crashing, a child calling over the wind and fairy-wren call, it can be observed that the wave covers a broad frequency range over a long period and the child's voice, dissipated on the wind over a distance of fifty metres, manifests as small scattered highlights, whereas the bird call is short, sharp and rhythmic.
The Soundscape images are composed via digital collage, layering spectrogram data from different days across the year to form compositions that encapsulate cycles of time and events at the Basin. For instance, in Soundscape: Fairy-Wren and Wave, the fairy-wren and the crashing wave, recorded on different days, claim a relationship to the same place: time allows the overlapping of events.
Soundscape: Soundscape: Birdsong, Ocean and Voice on the Wind, 198 x 152cm, Pigment Print.
Soundscape: Wave after Wave and Kelpie Barking, 60 x 80cm, Pigment Print.
Soundscape: Rocks, Waves and Wind, 60 x 80cm, Pigment Print.
Soundscape: Wave, Time Slipping, Phone Clicking, 60 x 80cm, Pigment Print.
Posthuman Synaesthesia
The cognitive triggering of visual manifestations of light and colour from the sensory input of sound is called synaesthesia. Researcher, Bulat M. Galeyev (1940 - 2009) describes synaesthesia as, “a specific manifestation of nonverbal thinking, realised by either involuntary or purposeful comparison of the impressions of different modalities, on the basis of structural or semantic and, most of all, emotional similarity.” Thus, it can be said that synaesthesia is a mode of feeling-thinking. I am not an 'involuntary' synaesthete: the Soundscape works rely on the technology of a spectrometer to trigger visual interpretations of sound. However, I make aesthetic decisions about the sounds that I record and the colours that I assign to shapes made by the spectrogram. I consider the process of Soundscapes to be a form of Posthuman synaesthesia: technologically-mediated, purposeful, nonverbal thinking.