Yolande Harris
My portfolio research has been an investigation into soundscape composition as a diegetic cinematic scoring practice, this investigation informed my dissertation research which became an exploration of the degrees of composition and abstraction in soundscape composition. The crux of the research is finding the balance of composition and audiovisual correspondence, which in this context is a realistic sensorial representation of the world. As this is my research I though Yolande Harris to be the most suitable visiting practitioner to do my presentation on. I’m going to be talking about her practice and philosophy with my related research dispersed throughout.
Yolande Harris is a sound artist and scholar who’s practice focuses on sonic consciousness, investigating our relationships with the environments that surround us. She analyses sound in relation to other senses, and the changing of the perception of our environments through placing different elements in it. This is presented in Yolande’s work ‘walk in the woods 2’ in which she reveals different parts of a forrest in northern Catalonia with projectors. Imagery from the projectors oscillate in and out of perceptibility, blending with the environment of the forrest. I think that this piece is a reflection of a concept I came across during my research by Michael Gallagher. Gallagher proposes that there is an element of composition in the act of playing back a field recording, this is because the field recording has its own spatial identity as does the room. When the recording is played in a room, the spatial identities blend and contrast, creating a juxtaposition. Yolande’s ‘Walk in the woods 2’, to me, is a visual representation of this concept, how visual or auditory information interacts with the space it is projected into.
The next piece Yolande presented was ‘The Pink Noise of pleaser yachts in turquoise sea’, a piece in which Yolande dropped hydrophones in the Balearic sea in Spain to record the engine noises of yachts. The piece emphasises the contrast of our perception of the picturesque tranquil sea from above, and the hidden soundscape below that we contribute to. The installation of this piece took the form of an immersive experience, in which the audience would stand on a projection of the turquoise sea, and through the use of headphones hanging above can listen to the soundscape underneath.
There are parallels here between my work and Yolande’s as the primary driver for my portfolio project is immersion into a composed sonic environment. To understand how to achieve immersion I thought it best to research soundscapes from an artistic perspective. Yolande’s piece immediately reminded me of the R.Murray Schafer quote in which he describes a soundscape as ‘the universal composition of which we are all composers’. By placing the audience in the environment not only visually by contextually, standing on top of the ocean in place of the yachts, the audience becomes the composer. I think its a near perfect representation of this concept. My practice currently doesn’t involve installation work so I don’t have the opportunity to contextually place my audience in the soundscape as Yolande has done, but I think this is a good way to approach creating cinematic soundscapes. This has caused me to consider the psychological influences composing with the anthropophony has on the immersion of a soundscape.