Wood Speaks
A conversation
Victoria Arney Artist & Jim Howard Musician
Bernie Krause in one of his ted talks about selective logging talks about our fixation with visual cues and how this only reveals a part of what is really happening.
Image 1. Catalogue of a walk 2021 woodcut 10 meters long
I am an artist that makes installation through print. I use the Cornell University Raven programme to analyse bird songs and calls that I encounter here in Southern France. They seemed like fragmen- tary sentences or a library with bits missing.
Just as John cage’s 4’33” which consists, for that length of time, of no deliberately played sounds at all focuses our attention of what is already present and reminds us that there is no such thing as si- lence, my encounter showed me a different kind of scripted space. The more I recorded the more I listened and the sounds began to encompass my walks and looking.
Soon places began to take on a moving screen of accompanied shimmers of sound that revealed the complexities that were outside of my visual awareness.
image 2 : sonograms in the studio
Much of my work involves the viewer walking through or looking from beneath the prints which is in part the sensation of making the recording in the first place.
This work uses the 2.25 seconds of sound for each plate so the 48 second recording becomes 24 Ja- panese wood plates.
The suspended rolls of rice paper move gently, focusing attention up to the song fragments which are echoed along each scroll back and forth.
I have included more participation with QR codes of the original sound encouraging multiple chance playing of those sounds in the space.
Some works become about certain places recording the flux of birds at different months and through different weather such as spring / fall where I recorded 6 months apart in the same place.
image 4 : winter wood panels uncut
image 5 : print of Winter on Japanese paper. 2022
Jim Howard (musician) in London had been following my progress ....
“As soon as I first saw Vicky’s prints I thought of them as a beautiful graphic score, as to me they resembled the sound wave patterns I see when I record and edit music and sound
It made me want to try ‘playing’ the prints as graphic scores. I loved the inspiration from the art, the colours victoria had chosen, the birdsong, and the natural world where they started, and wanted to add another layer and a personal response in music.
I am a trumpet player who sometimes uses electronics in recording and performance. This
combination allows me to improvise not just a melody, but a soundscape comprised of multiple
Layers, reflecting my response to the birdsong prints. I am not imitating the birds, but rather creating a world which might exist alongside them and the Forrest.
Because the piece is improvised it is a truer reflection of my response to the artwork in real time, as
opposed to a written piece”
Filmed by Jon Spaull
listening to a particular bird
The Eurasian nightingale has about 100 variables of clicks, trills, staccatos and slurs within its vocabulary. In spring I might encounter 10 or 12 nightingales each marking their territory through song. Walking and recording though revealed the element of silence that is inher- ent within this birds vocabulary. Image 6 :sonogram nightingale
For while each bird singings taking up much of the vertical space of each sonogram with its dexteri- ty it listens too. This is very marked on the sonograms of nightingales.
I recorded 4 Nightingales. I made a series of sonograms of each bird, lasting about 45 seconds these I over laid to see the rhythms of song and silence of each bird. Each bird was given a colour with variations of that colour marking the different sections so I could see on one page the variations and intervals between their song cycles.
Between Songs
Image 7 song intervals for a Nightingale Image 8 Silence intervals for a Nightingale.
The visualisation of these recordings and their gaps are an emotion response to each bird.
Music psychology has put forth the hypothesis that what makes music attractive for listeners is its dynamically fluctuating predictability26,27: That is, by building and breaking expectations on multiple timescales, music is thought to create a dynamic succession of different feelings.
Songbirds, like musicians, might use drifts or recurring rhythmic motifs to enable their listeners to form rhythm expectations, which can then be fulfilled, delayed, or broken.They might then – like musicians – make use of note timing to achieve expressiveness, driving their listeners’ expectations mixing predictable and unpredictable timing patterns.
Roeske, T.C., Kelty-Stephen, D. & Wallot, S. Multifractal analysis reveals music-like dynamic struc- ture in songbird rhythms.
Sci Rep 8, 4570 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-018-22933-2
These were a moment of contact between myself the listener and the unseen bird Place being the amphitheater for the sound and the silence.
If the place had other sounds those would ultimately alter the bird songs performance.
Nightingales are almost always hidden when singing, low on the branch hard to spot. So their song is loud, intrusive calling out.
Developing my conversation with Jim and thinking of colour as the emotional tool I sent sonogram printouts of the nightingales to Jim without explanation as to the species.
What is the interesting question here ? Do we need a framework at all ?
Both John Cage and Olivier Messiaen had comprehensive frameworks which they used to compose. Olivier Messiaen having developed his Modes of limited transpositions in his 20s to define as he claims unlimited boundaries to work within, John cage of course the roll of i-Ching chance with methodology.
The sonograms I sent to Jim have both chance and the vocalised methodology of the birds learnt repertoire.
Image 9 : rose nightingale sonogram 35 seconds
Image 10: Jims improvisation turned into a sonogram.
Part of this conversation between Jim and myself has been simply using nature and chance to re connect and create.
when the improvisations are analysed with the sonogram program you see moments where they cross in terms of complexity on the screen but what we are seeing in Jims improvisations are a sim- plification of what we are hearing. Jims improvisation re visualised are a step into a visual construc- tion that is built in long gaps and blocks, this is speed slowed, our perceptions of sound within a slowed down world.
This reminds us of the time gaps between nature and ourselves.
We are still only hearing half the story, but they hint at another time line .
These calls and songs carried here from the Sub Sahara, are learnt from generation to generation they provide us with a direct link with a past.
Our ancestors might have heard the same songs.
We can listen to the past and the future in one song.
French composer and ornithologist Olivier Messiaen again
The curlew in Catalogue d’oiseaux
As the fog quickly advances with the hour you realise : the quality of that bird’s call perfectly encap-sulates the experience of being in that place at that time.
Gold improvisation
Rose improvisation
copyright victoria Arney & Jim Howard
