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About the Festival
Joel Chadabe
Ear to the Earth, EMF's week-long festival of environmental sound, took place between October 6 and 14 at various venues in New York City. Composers, sound artists, and scientists came from England, New Zealand, France, Italy, Canada, Austria, Germany, and throughout the United States to participate in concerts, installations, and panels at different venues in downtown Manhattan. The venues were the World Financial Center, 3LD Arts and Technology Center, Judson Church, and Elevated Acre. The aim of the festival was to engage people in environmental issues through sound.
We heard the flow of water in the Bosavi rainforest. We heard sounds from New Delhi and New York. We heard the sounds of the river and life along the Danube. We visited the North Pole, listened to the Amazon River, heard the rain fall in British Columbia, witnessed the lives of feral pigeons. We heard the sea around Marseilles, the Atlantic coast of Europe from Holland to Spain. We heard the sounds of extinct and endangered species. In short, we spent a week listening to the sounds of our world.
There is a certain universality in music based on what we hear in the world around us. As Steven Feld, who studied Kaluli culture in Papua New Guinea, pointed out in The Soundscape Newsletter, June, 1994, one of the "sounds of the Bosavi environment, layered as a ground to the remarkable figures of avian life, is the hiss of water. Runoff from Mt. Bosavi, an extinct volcano, crisscrosses the Bosavi lands, turning into numerous rivers, creeks, falls, and streams ... Water flow also animates much of Kaluli musical imagination, as all waterway terms are also the names for the musical intervals, the segments of song, the patterns of rhythm, and the contours of melody."
But for us today, our environment-based compositions, as much as they may derive from our perceptions of the world around us, have a larger meaning. The compositions less reflect harmony with our environment and more represent an attempt to experience, understand, engage, and interact with a complex world. As David Dunn, environmental sound artist, wrote: "My foremost interest these days concerns ways that formal concepts and techniques of music and sound art can contribute to scientific research. Not only can sound artists reveal new phenomena within the natural world, their creative strategies for creating a compelling sonic experience out of the sounds of the natural world can have a deeper application within science itself."
I often have occasion to say that one can become engaged in the world through sound at three different levels: You can listen to the sounds around you, most of which convey normal, quotidian information. You can listen to the works of sound artists, which convey exceptional and illuminating information. And you can create sound art yourself, which causes you to focus your attention and search for what is exceptional and illuminating. Ultimately, it's about listening and understanding the meaning of what you hear. When art becomes a vehicle for exploration and research, listening becomes a powerful act. It becomes all the more powerful when it transforms awareness into consciousness and action.
Having learned the power of environmental music and sound to engage people in real and practical issues, we are now continuing to produce events, to encourage others to produce events, to create sound art, to listen, to discuss, and to become engaged. We view the Ear to the Earth Network as the next step. We hope you will join us.
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