Sonic Topography with
Field Recordings
Some Notes on the Sand Point Sound Gazetteer
Exploration is not so much a matter of covering the ground as of
digging beneath the surface: chance fragments of landscape, momentary
snatches of life, reflections caught on the wing-such are the things
that alone make it possible for us to understand and interpret horizons
which would otherwise have nothing to offer us.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955; translation by John
Russell)
The Sand Point Sound Gazetteer summer edition (SPSG) is a compact disc and map of on-site field recordings that document some of the sonic spaces of Sand Point Magnuson Park (SPMP), a former Naval base nestled in northeastern Seattle.
In recent years, Sand Point Magnuson Park has been on the verge of change. Arts groups, businesses, artists, and various non-profit organizations continue to trickle into the various buildings, sheds, and garages. I have no idea whether SPMP will become an industrial "park" or a real park or a corporate "campus" or a lush greenspace or a hybrid thereof, but I do know that the park – a crazy quilt maze of sports fields, abandoned concrete shacks, hidden nests, bunker-like bathrooms, footpaths, swampy creeks, desolate parking lots, and susurrating, weed-laden meadows – encompasses a highly variable sonic terrain in a comparatively compact location. This unique soundscape, a kind of soniferous garden, should be explored and preserved.
Like the atlases and gazetteers of old, the Sand Point Sound Gazetteer pinpoints typical, unusual, and mysterious (remember the Latin phrases Hic sunt Leones "Here there be Lions" and Terra Incognita "Unknown Earth" denoting unknown territories on Medieval maps?) locations of sound activity from playgrounds to distant parties to surging culverts to dog runs to balloons bouncing in the wind to....
Seattle Parks Dept. map altered by Christopher DeLaurenti.
I made multiple visits to Sand Point Magnuson Park during the summer of 2003. My audio equipment included an assortment of ordinary, inexpensive microphones as well as a now-dead Aiwa MiniDisc recorder and an ailing Tascam DA-P1 DAT deck. Although the SPSG also chronicles my many adventures and interesting encounters at the park, my most instructive experience proved too lengthy to include on the disc.
It was a warm summer night. Stars dotted an inky blue sky dappled with gray clouds. It was dark. Well, I suppose stars dotted and clouds dappled, but mainly I remember listening and waiting...
Behind me, waves swish and ripple against the dock of the Magnuson Boat Launch. Nearby, something – a crumpled scrap of paper? – skitters across the pebbled concrete with a swift, stuttering staccato scrape that I know I must capture.
I kneel and find a "Black Cat" firecracker wrapper. I don't touch it, lest the breeze pushes it again. Quickly, I crouch and uncoil a pair of lavalier microphones. I set one mic next to the wrapper, the other one 10 or 12 inches away – where I hope the wind will propel the wrapper. I hit record immediately and get lucky. Several seconds later the wrapper skips, tumbles, and stops in front of the second microphone.
At a glance, the level looks good on the MiniDisc recorder, so I scoop up my gear and reposition the microphones, just as before. A moment or two passes, and again the wind pushes the wrapper panoramically from one microphone to the other. I'm elated. I have caught something fleeting and wonderful. And I want, I need, more. I spot a clear plastic bag – the kind supermarket shoppers use to segregate vegetables from other food – did it move slightly? I imagine the bag slithering and wafting across the concrete, whooshing and crackling tremulously.
Hurriedly I arrange my microphones, one next to the plastic bag, the other downwind. I wait a couple minutes. Nothing happens. No wind, not even the hint of a breeze.
What should I do? I'm agitated. I think, "Why am I concerned with waiting? Do I not have enough discipline in my life? I can wait two more minutes."
At around the five minute mark, I decide that waiting five minutes for a plastic bag to move is not sufficient and thus I should wait a little bit more: eight minutes – a good mark because a lot of classic electro-acoustic music pieces last around 8 minutes.
So I wait eight minutes. And the plastic bag does not move, does not twitch, does not rustle. On the MiniDisc recorder, the level remains negligible. I keep waiting. My eyes, although fixed on the MiniDisc's timing display, see nothing. Minutes and seconds elapse but I am listening and waiting – not counting.
I am still listening, waiting and recording. I hope, somewhat poetically, that this goddamn plastic bag will alight into the air: Aloft on gossamer wing it hovers, bends, dances, and twirls in a magnificent sculpture that my microphones capture and relay back to the listener.
Minutes later, nothing has happened. I tell myself, "I can wait a couple more minutes." So I do.
Minutes later, I ask myself "Have I waited long enough? I've waited long enough. No I haven't waited long enough." I wait three more minutes. Or is it seconds?
Minutes later, I find that I've been sitting next to a plastic bag that has not moved, shows no indication of moving, and I realize that I do have discipline, but only to make the foolish judgment to sit here for 12, 16 or 22 minutes while this plastic bag does nothing.
Now of course, this kind of story can stretch into infinity.
A car approaches, a bullhorn announces the closure of the park.
The car pulls up close and the security guard asks me "The park is closing soon, is that your truck?" I tell him no, that I took the bus, and he says "Oh, well then you're alright. It doesn't affect you."
It doesn't. I can wait, still. I can listen, still.
I wasn't waiting for a plastic bag to move. Ostensibly I was, but I waited, I waited, I waited, and I got a good recording of me talking to the guard.
I do not always find what I seek, so then I must transform what I found into what I seek.
In compiling the SPSG, I culled, not edited, all of the tracks from the original recordings and transferred them digitally from MiniDisc and DAT into my computer. No track was stitched together or composited from other recordings. Almost all of them were unprocessed in any way, though I subjected two or three to some discreet noise reduction. I lowered the level of one track to save your ears and your speakers.
I record sound because I love to listen; I wanted to preserve what I heard, what I loved, and convey what a careful listener might hear in the park.
photo by Christopher DeLaurenti.
When perusing a reference work like a dictionary or an atlas, how many people read from beginning to end, from A to Z? Most of us leisurely leaf through the pages; I hope listeners browse the SPSG's 99 tracks in a similar, serendipitous way with a CD player or other playback device in automatic random shuffle mode.
Unlike most recordings, the SPSG has a very wide dynamic range, from the threshold of audibility to mildly loud, so I created a calibration track for listeners to set the playback volume accordingly. As printed on the disc surface, track 7, the calibration track, is the loudest piece on the disc; the remaining tracks are meant to heard relative to the calibration track, ensuring that faint whispers and distant cries remain appropriately quiet, not overamplified.
Headphone listening, though not essential, will reveal additional detail. Serving as the aural equivalent of margins, flyleaves, and endpapers, some tracks are completely silent.
In the exploratory sprit of early dictionaries and ancient maps, the SPSG is woefully yet earnestly incomplete, betraying the character and compulsions of its compiler. The symbols and corresponding track numbers on the SPSG map denote only the recording location. Just as old maps and charts miss crucial details, I supplied no additional information about the time, date, or nature of the recordings. The SPSG map teems with unexplored, perhaps ignored, probably overlooked, territory: Blank, open spaces leave room for lions – and those who wish to find them.
I hope the SPSG not only invites careful listening, but spurs others to explore and document the quickly changing sonic spaces of Sand Point Magnuson Park. I own neither the space, nor the sounds, nor the concept; I encourage others to create, compile, and release their own Sand Point Sound Gazetteers.
Free to the public, the SPSG was distributed plainly in a rough-hewn wood stand at Sand Point Magnuson Park in tandem with outdoor sculptures and installations during the VERGE exhibition from August 16 to September 14, 2003; printed and packaged on a newsprint tabloid broadsheet, the accompanying map is based on a graphic created by the Seattle Parks Department. I hope these generic, deliberately unremarkable, and vague visual aspects help defer attention towards listening and spur the aural imagination.
The SPSG was a site-specific release, available neither in stores, nor on the web. While the mp3 excerpts posted at http://www.delaurenti.net/music.htm offer a sample of the SPSG, they do not supplant the experience of finding the map and listening to the disc. The SPSG is sporadically available when I find a remaining copy or two amid the rubble of my files. Most of them have disappeared, taken by park visitors into terra incognita.
Unlike the CDs, cassettes, LPs and even 78 rpm disks that have accompanied magazines and other periodicals for decades, the SPSG is the second in my series of Ulterior Audio projects: CDs aimed at an unsuspecting, non-specialist audience, ideally ordinary people who might never encounter unusual sound work. By choosing a limited, site-specific, and unexpected context and then surprising random recipients with a tangible, take-home work, I hope the SPSG enticed a listening public into the unfamiliar and unusual.
The Sand Point Sound Gazetteer was made possible by Sand Point Arts and Cultural Exchange (aka SPACE). Thanks to Real Time Duplication, graphics ace Thomas Lenon, the crafty fellow who built the wooden stand (I lost your name in an email crash!), and curator Katie Kurtz.