Implementing Advanced Knowledge
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7.6.1 Reflections on listening and acoustic ecology Carlos Gรณmez
Reflections on listening and acoustic ecology “I’ve been looking at this river so long, I’ve seen the same drop go by a few times”
Introduction
It could be said that this text is nothing more than a description or manifesto of something that will be. A compendium of terms and scenarios few conclusions could be drawn from, since it refers to a project that has barely started, and if it keeps going at this pace could take me years to finish. Still, as we’ll see, it could also be a project that is wholly unrealizable. Perhaps it is in this lack of measure, made up as it is of diminutive pieces, that we may find my conception of the perceptive universe and, as a consequence, my conception of listening. I even believe that over the period this project is being carried out, an interesting activity will be to compare what I am writing here about the project with what it turns out like in the future. This text is nothing more than an expression of will, like so many others I have written and will write from out of my quietude on the banks of the Magdalena. It is no more than a promise, or perhaps a debt, that one day I hope to be able to fulfil or pay.
The dream
For years I have been doing a series of sound pieces called “Magdalena Medio”. Like a kind of obsession, like the memory of a dream, the memory of my grandfather when he “went down” to the Magdalena to fish and especially to be alone. He always went with a small canvas tarp and a fishing rod. He only took the little he needed for his time of solitude, of quietude, for that state of contemplation that had always distinguished him. He went down to the Magdalena to recover from the people on the steppe, from his very own family. I have never in my life known anyone so intent on wearing down the horizon with his gaze. I cannot imagine what that man ended up hearing in his lifetime, the things he heard from the immense La Magdalena River, back when it truly was an immense river. This project is dedicated to my grandfather, to all the drops of water he saw go by, to that thinly beautiful survivor who in the end could not outlast his cigarettes. With background of other projects I had done in my lifetime in relation to sound landscapes, acoustic ecology and listening, and with the idea of travelling the entire length of the Magdalena River, in 2015 I finally was able to begin by much-desired project, the project I had been dreaming of for so long, with a first campaign in Honda. Cover - La Magdalena River, IaaC Archive Figure 1 - La Magdalena River, Carlos Gómez 2
El Magdalena Medio
The first idea was to travel down from the very source of the river in the Andes range, yet the opportunity arose to use the house at the Flora Ars+Natura foundation in Honda, on the banks of the Magdalena, as the base for my activities. It is just where the river begins to be navigable, and just where my grandfather used to go to fish. This stroke of luck meant that my project would begin in one of the most complex zones of Colombia, as the Magdalena River means a lot of things to Colombians, not all of them particularly beautiful.
“...I cannot imagine what that man ended up hearing in his lifefime, the things he heard from the immense La Magdalena River...�
In the same way that the Magdalena River has been the major axis of Colombian economic development, especially in the central zone, and was traditionally what connected some of the country’s most important cities to the Caribbean, it has also been one of the major focal points (if not the most important) for the armed conflict plaguing Colombian history for over fifty years. The banks of the Magdalena and its entire channel have also been affected by the most aggressive devastation ever seen in the country, including herding, large farms with intensive production, the construction of hydroelectric dams, mining, and population shifts caused by the conflict itself: these are now the distinguishing features of Colombia’s most important river.
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Perhaps the roots of the problem go further back, back to the moment when a few gentlemen decided there were going to be some rivers more important than others, some lands and some people more important than other lands and other people. This is where the crime and destruction originate from. As long as we keep thinking there are some regions of greater importance than others, some deaths more important than others, everything will continue to go down a path of ruthlessness, and that is something the Rio Grande de la Magdalena is not going to put a halt to.
Figure 1 - Rome 20-25 - 50x50 km grid superimposed on the metropolitan area of Rome. Figure 2 - Physical configuration, metropolitan dynamics and systemic representation, for an interpretation of Rome through three phases: Rome 1.0 –compact city and territorial enclave, with concentrated dynamics in a mono-nodal system- evolved during the XX century in Rome 2.0 , a linear multi-city, a centralized system innervated by center-periphery connection on the radial infrastructure system. In 2025 we can define Rome 3.0 as an Agri-Fab city, a territorial metropolis structured by a productive landscape as a transversal connections in a distributed system. Figure 3 - The Castelli area between the villages of Montecompatri and Colonna. A productive territory an
A methodology of listening and adaptation
How might we come up with methodologies allowing us, by means of listening and sound recording, to understand some of the most intimate questions of a river’s behaviour, and above all their meanings? On the one hand there are the technical, or better said, technological questions, of how to understand technology as an extension of our perceptive experience and not just as a tool for mediation. Even here, I might add that our technology and science are based on measurement and perhaps comparison as well, keeping in mind that the comparative act is also an act of measuring. In this way, I like to think that these exercises in perception are nothing more than an attempt at listening as a measuring tool. What most likely turns all this into a sublime experience is the fact of keeping to certain methodologies, allowing me to compare and expose major differences between highly similar landscapes. I believe that in the search for such differences we find that an apparently passive attitude can become a source of knowledge expanding perceptive horizons, along with the thresholds of knowledge itself, of course. On the other hand, one vital thing remains constant: quietude. All the recordings heard in this project are and will be done from a listening point that pertains to quietude tending to the absolute. One of the most persistent paradoxes in sonology is the fact of trying to know what nature sounds like; in making this effort, we find that our very presence radically alters the landscape, that what we are really listening to is
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a reaction of the environment to our presence and our technology. In this way, what we are really hearing is a type of acoustic shadow brought on by our very presence. It is as if we were really listening to ourselves (basing ourselves on this awareness, it could also be said that this is what this project is about: how to listen to ourselves). How then might we significantly reduce the impact of our presence and machinery in recording in a specific context? One of the most important concepts of this project’s methodology and analytical model is “comparative listening”; in this way, the idea would be to see what nature sounds like in our presence, and what it would sound like without us. It is impossible to create a ground zero of technological intervention in an environment we wish to record; regardless, there are ways to record with what we may call a less invasive intervention. The sound recordings of this project were done using three different technologies: the first used conventional highquality field recording devices; the second was done with the same recording device, though by means of underwater transmitters; the third, used for longterm recordings, involves a device that does not require human intervention to be activated. Its characteristics allow it to be “abandoned” in any place for a long period of time, with the consequences this implies: recordings are made “in absentia”.
Readings or examples of approximation
What follows is a presentation of the context and possible reading of one of these three types of recording techniques. Location: 5º 17’ 18” N – 74º 43’ 60” W - Honda, Tolima (Colombia). Down a flight of stairs from the public park to a large beach known as Arrancaplumas, where the former port of Honda used to be. The place is found between two bridges about 400 metres apart.
Underwater recording
Hydrophones record three kinds of sounds: 1. Those transmitted by the direct vibration of the riverbed. Especially deeppitched sounds caused by heavy-vehicle traffic on the bridge, and passed on through the bridge supports anchored into the river. 2. Acoustic impulses transmitted by the water. In this case we can hear the sounds of small motors on canoes coming and going, and the movement of fishing tackle hitting the water and the river bottom. 3. The direct striking of thousands of particles on the microphones. The Magdalena River carries a great deal of material in its sediments, so that if we think of the speed of the current we can understand that there is no single speed, that the river is everything it carries along together with its water, for Figure 2 - Recording technology, Carlos Gómez
every kind of material goes at its own speed, and each has its own resistance factor to the stream. The river is in fact many rivers, with varying dynamics, speeds and behaviour. I like to think of the river as a rock, not only because of the mineral characteristics of its main occupant, but due to its very dynamic and evolution. It is a rather quick rock, to be sure, and a rather capricious one at that.
Aerial recording
To our left there is a grey bridge with a concrete foundation, holding up the most important road running from Bogotá to the Magdalena Medio. The traffic is heavy and rarely lets up. To our right is a lovely yellow metallic and wood bridge which nowadays is only used for pedestrian traffic. This was the first bridge built especially for cars crossing the Magdalena River, and would seem to have been the first of its kind in South America. The sound coming from the grey bridge fills up almost everything, even concealing the sound of the river itself at times. The yellow bridge, in contrast, remains wonderfully silent.
Recording in absentia
A few meters away from Arrancaplumas we find the garden of the house of Señora Lucrecia Díaz. It was there, in the lemon tree, that the SM3 recorded an entire night from the 8th to 9th of September, 2015. It is a transitional area between the riverbank and the first houses of Honda. Beside the home, a great amount of noise comes from the public park and everything around: the bridges, the roosters and birds, the radio at night broadcasting a religious program with the voice of a horribly suspicious man.
Sound recording as a measuring tool
Until rather recently the sound factor was not understood as a measuring gauge for the changing processes of an ecosystem. Sonography was basically limited to recording single individuals, understanding the sound object as a unique expression amongst all kinds of communication between people. For this reason, even in the field of ethology, sound recording was limited to attempts to determine the unique quality of certain sounds, making them culturally predisposed to have a use within communication between people of the same species, thus defining their function. If we think that soundscapes bring together the totality of these singularities, and that in spite of what was recently thought, species are predetermined to live within a landscape while evolving towards inter-species communication, we can appreciate that the isolated sound recording of individuals is rather useless. This is where we might find a utility for the recording of soundscapes taken “as a whole”. 8
Figure 3 - Underwater recording, Carlos Gรณmez Figure 4 - Aerial recording, Carlos Gรณmez Figure 5 - Recording in absentia, Carlos Gรณmez
Copyright © 2014 Institute for Advanced Architecture of Catalonia All rights Reserved. IAAC BIT 7 September 2016
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