The material used in Carta de Ausculto (Charter of Listening) was recorded in the Chambers Farm Wood in Lincolnshire during the months of April, July and October in 2010. My first idea was to recreate a some kind of idealised portrait of the sonic beauties of forest soundscapes in Lincolnshire. After the first few days I was both enthusiastic and depressed. I had managed to record some birds, winds and insects with a great acoustic perspective. Yet also for minutes-on-end the over flights of airplanes and something I first thought to be UK Olympic skeet shooting team practicing nearby. I later learned that the shotgun sounds were really propane powered bird scarers.
While wandering through forest recording and counting the hours of editing I had ahead me, getting rid of all airplanes, bird scarers and traffic, I remembered a definition of natural silence I had read about in a book called One Square Inch of Silence. According to the author Gordon Hempton a place can be called silent if there is no intrusion of human made sounds for 15 minutes. Dogs count as human made sounds by this definition. To my experience it is very difficult to find a place one could call silent according to this definition. You can test it yourself if you want. I think even seven minutes silence or quiet under these terms is a lot.
After a week of recording something remarkable happened. An Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull erupted. First a big ash cloud started to drift towards Scandinavia and in the news it was reported that airspace had been momentarily closed for all air traffic in Sweden and in Finland.
Then the ash cloud started to drift southwards. On the morning of Thursday 15 of April, I heard a news item that some Scottish airports had been closed. At breakfast I learned that also Newcastle airport was to be closed. On the way to Chambers Farm Wood BBC announced that UK and most of the Northern Europe was now a no-flight zone.
I started to record frantically. Most of my material was recorded during those six days when the ash cloud drifted over Europe. On the last day of the flight ban the Forestry officials had organised a grey squirrel hunt so there was no point in recording at the same time. I continued to record after the air traffic resumed later in April. While wandering in the forest I started to think would it be possible to have an international No Flights Day once a year or maybe even just six hours of no flight zone rolling around the globe during one day? Should this be included in the contemporary version of The Charter of the Forest? The right to spend a day or even few hours in a forest without the company of airplanes.
I returned to Lincolnshire in June and I managed to get some lovely leafy winds moving in the trees and bushes and some great insects, I especially liked the grasshoppers. Nevertheless I felt weary whenever I spotted an airplane approaching. The six days in April seemed to have sensitised me even more to the sounds of the air traffic. Despite that I kept soldiering on because I was still missing at least one sound, that of rain.
While recording environmental sounds both before and after Ash Thursday I noticed that airplane noises, although they are not that loud, seem to mask other sounds very effectively. After the high flying airplanes had disappeared the traffic noises seemed to be very present. Suddenly it was also easier to discriminate between different traffic generated sounds, motorbikes, lorries, cars etc. This was an interesting observation. It seems that some sounds that are not that loud can effectively mask other human generated and natural sounds. This would indicate that drone-like air traffic sounds affect the transaudibility of natural sound environments. Transaudible is term I have coined to describe the clarity or translucence of certain sound environments. [transaudible, adjective, not opaque, sounding through, appearing through; compare transparent]
By transaudible I mean a soundscape where there is very little masking. Sounds from close by and faraway events do not cover each other. In transaudible soundscape the space itself becomes audible. One could say that transaudible soundscapes sound as if they were well orchestrated.
Without the airplanes I started notice the percussion section of car doors that I had not paid any attention before.
Transaudible does not necessarily refer to natural quiet because I think that a soundscape can be transaudible even if it contains human originated sounds. The main issue to me is that more quiet sound elements do not disappear behind louder elements. There is clarity, resolution and space.
So transaudible soundscape would preserve both the sounds loud and soft and the feeling that there is space where they can resonate. Transaudible environment would preserve both the sounds and the space.
I think that the concept of transaudibility could provide us a yardstick to measure soundscapes more qualitatively. Unlike the dB measurements it might give us a qualitative tool how to assess and examine different sound environments.
Another reason airplanes annoy an environmental recordist is that the high altitude overflights take quite long to pass. In Chambers Farm Wood the sound of an average overflight was audible on a recording for 9 minutes. Four overflights during an hour would destroy 36 minutes of the recording time. Due to their nature airplane sounds are practically impossible to filter or edit out.
All the time while I was recording I was thinking about the structure of the piece and how it should sound. My original thought was to produce an idealised version of the limewood forest soundscape. I would edit out most of the human related sounds and provide an acoustic view to what the “natural” soundscape could be like. I was hoping that this would help listeners to appreciate the riches of forest soundscapes and maybe help to preserve them.
After a while I realised that this approach would not work. It would simply involve too much editing and it would also blur the documentary quality of my material: I had captured the soundscape of Chambers Farm Wood during the historical flight ban. To my knowledge this had happened only once in my lifetime, after the 9/11 the US airspace was closed three days for commercial traffic.
I also realised that the questions relating to our sound environment had an interesting connection with the Charter of the Forest and so-called everyman´s rights. If the Charter would be given today what kind rights it would or should grant to ordinary people.
The original Carta de Foresta gave free men the right to collect firewood, herd swine, graze cattle, cut turf for fuel, etc. What would be the present day equivalents of these rights? What could the modern Carta de Foresta offer, or guarantee us?
What Carta de Foresta guaranteed to free men were gifts of the forest, they were surplus, something that would have been laid to waste anyway had it not been used, at least most of it.
The gifts of the forest, are renewables, they grow, or appear time and again, use does not lessen or reduce them in anyway.
Charter of the Forest turned old forests, that had belonged to the King, into commons. Some writers have described commons as a set of assets that have two characteristics: they are all gifts, and they are all shared. A shared gift is one we receive as members of a community, as opposed to individually. Examples of such gifts include air, water, ecosystems, languages, art. In to this list I would add soundscapes. All these assets, if treated responsibly, are gifts that keep on giving.
Soundscapes are like the air we breath they are not owned by anybody and like the air we breath they are getting ever more polluted.
If the soundscape is common, how much sounds and noises can be added to it without ruining it?
The way soundscapes evolve reminds one of sorites puzzle. Sorites is an old Greek philosophical paradox and its name refers to a pile of something for example pebbles. If we have a small pile of pebbles and we add one pebble to it surely it will still be a small pile of pebbles. The paradox lies in the fact that if we keep repeating the operation above we will eventually have a huge mountain of pebbles but we cannot point to a moment when the change happened.
The authorities seem to think that we can always add a little bit of noise to the environment and this does not really affect the overall noise level one bit. I beg to differ.
Carta de Ausculto is a sonic documentary of Lincolnshire limewood forests before, during, and after the “Ash Thursday” (15.4.2010) and five days that followed when Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland erupted and North European airspace was closed. I hope that this work helps audience to appreciate “natural” soundscapes and what is left of them.
Carta de Ausculto is a part of an artistic research project that studies transaudibility of different sonic environments. The first work in this series was Virtual Forest, that was commissioned for the sound gallery of Sender Freies Berlin Radio in 1999. Carta de Ausculto has also a sister work Lincolnshire Sketches that was exhibited in Turku, Finland in 2010.
The Soundwall consist of 22 loudspeakers, in various groups, installed on three levels. Due to its large scale the Soundwall offers many different acoustic perspectives to Carta de Ausculto. I encourage the audience to explore the work from “different points of hearing” or even moving during the playback. The recording process was peripatetic in nature, it involved a lot walking and wandering in the forest. I think a peripatetic listening of the work is also worth a try.
Simo Alitalo
Simo Alitalo 