"In 2012 Sally Ann McIntyre, a New Zealand based artist who works predominantly with radio signals
and field recordings, spent six weeks on Kapiti Island, a coastal island in New Zealand. The island is a
wildlife sanctuary yet is not the typical nature recordists’ fare. On the island McIntyre found the ruins of
Māori settlement, the whaling industry, battles and deforestation. Instead of imagining the island as a
pristine sanctuary, ripe for the field recording of an innocent nature, McIntyre records the sounds she
actually finds there. She explains that while from a distance the island might look uninhabited, when on it
evidence for human inhabitation is prevalent: “Aeroplanes break the fiction of natural silence, salt-wind
weathered signs announce ‘no landing here’, giant reflectors on the hills warn those looking from the sea
of the protected marine reserve border, and the beach is strewn with ambiguous historic signs and
remnants delivered back to the land by the waves.”
While McIntyre still holds to the desire for pure non-manipulated field recordings (as evidenced by
recent releases on record labels who pronounce that the works are ‘unprocessed’), in fact she is clearly
open to processing the ‘natural sound’ pre-recording. On discovering a buoy on the coast McIntyre
placed a microphone inside and captured the resulting sounds from within. Industrial waste becomes a
filter through which listeners experience the sounds on Kapiti Island."
Dugal McKinnon writes lengthily on Collected Silences for Lord Rothschild and Huia Transcriptions, in his paper Dead Silence: ecological silencing and environmentally-engaged sound-art, for Leonardo Music Journal:
"For contemporary sound artists engaged with environmental matters in which silence plays a role, the
question is how to make dead silence speak? How to represent and deploy it meaningfully and in ways
that do not cloak it in the habits of silence associated with Cage and acoustic ecology? One of the most
problematic silences for both Cage and acoustic ecology is the substitution of recorded for live sound.
The fear here, following Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, is that the recording silences the living,
sounding thing. This perennial concern, encapsulated in Schafer’s concept of schizophonia as an aberrant
technological phenomenon, is old as recording technology itself. Contra this perspective however,
recording can be used to musicalize acoustic silence as the horizon of the audible, bringing it into dialogue
with Cageian silence and, as we will shortly hear, creating a powerful affective tool through which to
address ecological silencing.
The musicalisation of acoustic silence is made possible by the intentional act of recording which functions
as framing device for acoustic silence. This is a Cageian move: the giving of duration to something that is
without duration, just as 4’33” gives form to the silence of the place of listening thereby calling attention
to what is acoustically present there. If nothing is acoustically present, or if the thing being recorded
cannot be acoustically present, then recording -- and listening -- draws attention to the acoustic silence
of that thing. Such a move can be conceptual, as in Yoko Ono’s Tape Piece III or artist Julian Dashper’s
recordings of canonic art works of the 20th century. When the intention of the work is ecological
however, acoustic silence takes political form; the gap between the acoustic absence of silenced thing and
the Cageian silence we hear around it calls attention to the irrevocable loss inherent in that heterogeneous
silence. This is achieved in Sally McIntyre’s transmission arts piece, Collected Silences for Lord
Rothschild (2012), which replicates Dashper’s move but with an ethical-environmental dimension:
"Recordings
of the mounted specimens of two species of endemic New Zealand birds, the Huia
(Heteralocha acutirostris), and the Laughing Owl or Whekau (Sceloglaux albifacies) held in the
collection of The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Both these species were driven to
extinction, partially through the actions of European collectors, in the early 1900s. They were both still
recorded as alive during the twentieth century's first blossoming, after the invention of recording
technology, but neither of their songs are on record."
(Heteralocha acutirostris), and the Laughing Owl or Whekau (Sceloglaux albifacies) held in the
collection of The Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa. Both these species were driven to
extinction, partially through the actions of European collectors, in the early 1900s. They were both still
recorded as alive during the twentieth century's first blossoming, after the invention of recording
technology, but neither of their songs are on record."
Making dead silences speak may also be predicated
not on acoustic silence but, taking a conceptual
turn, by evoking the ecological silence of an extinct thing through sound. Another work by McIntyre,
Huia Transcriptions (2012), uses “transcriptions to music box of one of the few extant accounts of the
calls of Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), as notated by a Mr. H. T. Caver in the late 1800s” which are
“played back in the early morning chorus into forest areas of Kapiti [Island, NZ], amplified
non-electronically on the trunks of species of trees Huia would likely have climbed”. What this allows us
to hear, negatively magnified through the audible presence of living birds, is the silence of the extinct Huia,
as the simple transcriptions and music box realisation of these fail, poetically and affectingly, to do
anything more than gracelessly approximate a call known only through musical and textual descriptions.
turn, by evoking the ecological silence of an extinct thing through sound. Another work by McIntyre,
Huia Transcriptions (2012), uses “transcriptions to music box of one of the few extant accounts of the
calls of Huia (Heteralocha acutirostris), as notated by a Mr. H. T. Caver in the late 1800s” which are
“played back in the early morning chorus into forest areas of Kapiti [Island, NZ], amplified
non-electronically on the trunks of species of trees Huia would likely have climbed”. What this allows us
to hear, negatively magnified through the audible presence of living birds, is the silence of the extinct Huia,
as the simple transcriptions and music box realisation of these fail, poetically and affectingly, to do
anything more than gracelessly approximate a call known only through musical and textual descriptions.
plays a vital role in environmentally engaged sound art such as McIntyre’s. Schismogenesis, in Stephen
Feld’s use of the term (itself borrowed from Gregory Bateson), brings a new kind of sonic entity into
being, which reveals aspects of its live source but is not the same as this source. This is a useful word for
a familiar idea, much beloved by phonographists of all kinds: schismogenesis is what made possible the
soundscape analyses of the World Soundscape Project as well as the sonic discourse of Schaefferian
musique concrète. Yet the recording does not and cannot substitute for the absent source, despite the
presence of its acoustic trace."