I have done recordings and research in Lincolnshire during the spring and summer of 2010. My work is part of Sowing Seeds artist residency in East Midlands, UK.
My host in Lincolnshire is The Collection, local museum that houses two institutions under the same roof; one part concentrates in archeology, the other in contemporary art. The Collection has an interesting asset, a construction called Soundwall. It is a 16 channel playback system installed permanently inside the big wall facing the entrance hall of the museum.
Another asset that pertains to the Collection is a medieval document the Charter of the Forest. It is a contract that was appended to Magna Charta in 1217. While Magna Charta guaranteed important political and judicial rights to citizens, the Charter of the Forest guaranteed common people the right to use forests for herding and gathering firewood, mushrooms or acorns. A kind of declaration of Everyman’s right to use the forests.
The third element in the residency is The Lincolnshire Limewoods Project, which tries to save the ancient woodlands. Their Education Center is in the Chambers Farm Wood.
The Collection wanted to invite a sound artist who would be interested in producing a work that would somehow incorporate the Charter of the Forest theme and the Soundwall and the Limewoods Project. I have previously worked under similar premises when I produced a multi-channel work Virtual Forest for the Sound gallery of Sender Freies Berlin in 1999. I was immediately intrigued by the opportunity to return to the issues of transaudibility and forest soundscapes I had studied ten years before.
When I arrived to Lincoln and visited the Chambers Farm Wood I realised what I was up to. The small size of the forested areas means that roads and traffic are quite close. High altitude overflights occur roughly every nine minutes, this means that with recording instruments you can detect an approaching or leaving airplane with three minutes of no airplane noise in between. There was also a lot of amateur piloting, thanks to several old RAF airfields. Lincolnshire used to be the home of RAF bomber command. Third dominant sound element that I encountered were the audio bird scarers.
While wandering through the forest and listening to the traffic, airplanes and blasting of the bird scarers, I started to miss for some moments of quiet. How about an international no flights day once a year ?
Or maybe even just six hours of no flights rolling around the globe during one day?
Should our children have a possibility even once or twice to hear what nature used to sound before there were airplanes?
Should this right 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 sound of motors?
Then the unthinkable happened: the eruption Eyjafjallajökull in Iceland stopped the air traffic in northern Europe.
Listening and recording the Chambers Farm Wood during the following days, after the no-flight regulations in April, was like I had received a gift.
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.
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 translusens of certain sound environments. [transaudible, not opaque, sounding through, appearing through]
By transaudible I mean a soundscape where there is very little masking. Sounds from close-up 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 (from the parking lot) that I had not paid any attention before.
I think that the concept of transaudibility could provide us a yardstick to measure soundscape more qualitatively. Unlike the dB measurements it might give us a qualitative tool how to assess and examine different sound environments.
Lincolnshire Sketches is a documentary work that tries to offer a hearkening to the soundscape of Chambers Farm Wood before and after Ash Thursday April 2010. It is a part of an artistic research project into concept of transaudibility that started with installation Virtual Forest in 1999.
Sowing Seeds is a region-wide programme of International Artist residencies (IAiR) in East-Midlands in England. The seeds that may develop into major new commissions and exhibitions for 2011 at ‘Connecting Communities’ and ‘The Great Exhibition’ 2012. ( http://www.sowing-seeds.com)
Residency is funded by Lincolnshire County Council, Arts Council East Midlands and Cultural Olympiad.
Simo Alitalo 