Forests: A Book of Hours is a journey, in sound and music, through some of the tropical forests I have had the opportunity to visit and work in over the past decade, including parts of Madagascar, Kenya and Brazil. These are enchanted places: not wistful projections of a Paradise Lost but living and breathing communities of plants, animals and people. They are imbued with a worldly mystery of their own unique place in an infinite universe. Many of these habitats are endangered and disappearing. Despite the ‘progress’ of civilization, we face a catastrophic loss of life on earth: a march of folly which will be unforgivable in the eyes and ears of those who follow us. It is hard to know what to do or how to respond meanfully, for the environmental crisis is also a crisis of cultural values––a moral, spiritual and aesthetic lassitude. In the most profound capacity, music and listening afford us an opportunity to be mindful, to be present in the lives we are living. If nothing else, this is a beginning from which change is possible.

Forests: A Book of Hours is also a personal meditation and a work of fiction. I am not attempting to document the natural soundscape, as an objective endeavor. There are traces of documentary evidence in the field recordings, which are otherwise a subjective and musical representation. The transformations of ‘natural sound’ and ‘music’ are the shifting perspectives of a figure in the soundscape: listening and sounding, apart and a part. These are my songlines: geographies of mind and spirit. As a composer, I am interested in sonic pattern in a broad sense: the morphic resonance, as it were, of the soundscape. The term is borrowed from Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist and philosopher, who is interested in habit and the persistence of memory as inherent aspects of nature. In thinking about his ideas, I have often been struck by not only by the particular and unique acoustic features of a place, but also by the similarities that exist in the sounds of species half a world away. I refer to this relationship of like sounds as acoustifractal––referring to scalable sound and morphological similarity in a soundscape. For example, the early morning contact call of black and white colobus monkeys from dormitory trees in East Africa has a corresponding sound and voice in howler monkeys, whose roaring can be heard through the rainforest canopy of the Amazon. The same is true for the barking, hocket-like calls of a pair of Amazon barred-forest falcons and the similar sounds of fruit bats from Southern Madagascar. These are a few of the many species are represented on this recording.

Finally, Forests: A Book of Hours is a mythical conjuring of place, through intuitive response and memory––a recalling of personal experiences and the collective memory of sounds with myriad voices. As a journey in time, the composition encompasses the hours of a day, from pre-dawn into night. The sections are titled after the Benedictine horarium, the Book of Hours, describing periods of prayer and meditation that mark the passage of a day. Within this structure, there are overlapping and intersecting sound fields, corresponding to different spaces and places, both real and imagined. These include fragments of unadulterated and unedited field recordings, processed soundscapes, electroacoustic instruments, human voice and hybridized sounds that comprise both living voices and electronically generated timbres. I am reminded that we ‘play’ music and I consider these musical materials as playful constructions and deconstructions, created to efface the boundaries between what is perceived of as ‘real’ and that which is musically manufactured. Only the mind knows such distinctions; the ear and the heart do not.

Guide to the Tracks

1. Dawn (Track Time: 20’25")
a) Matins (Time: 0’00"-1’00"). The day begins in the twilight before dawn in the northern Brazilian Amazon. Dew drops and drizzle roll off leaves.
b) Lauds (Time: 1’00"-1’30"). The sounds of the night transition to day; bats fly through forest corridors calling and feeding on insects. Discrete samples, obtained and modified through granular synthesis, are introduced into different bands of the audio spectrum, in between layers of insects and around the acoustic calling "windows" of birds. This technique is employed throughout the composition in various sections and varying degrees, rather than continuously.
c) Chapter (Time: 1’30"-4’10")Awakening voices of buff-throated foliage gleaners, blue-crowned motmots, variagated ant pittas, and faciated antshrikes are heard in the distance. Waning frog voices and their manipulated acoustical counterparts are blended into the veneer of insect voices. A pair of barred forest falcons can be heard; their characteristic barking calls are reminiscent of medieval hocketing.
d) Prime (Time: 4’10"-10’50"). The dawn chorus is joined by human singers from Kenya. As they fall silent, a chorus of black and white colobus monkeys are heard against their New World counterpart, the howler monkey. The soundscape shifts from the Amazon to Kakamega Forest in Kenya, and back to a rainforest canopy observation platform at a different Amazon location (see Amazon Journal below).
e) Terce (Time: 10’50"-20’25") Diurnal insects come to life, as well as birds heard singing in a secondary dawn chorus. The soundscape merges with that of a spiney desert forest in Southern Madagascar. Here, synthesized and vocal samples are mixed with insects, birds and clarinet. Ratcheting cicadas yield to a burst of territorial posturing by a group of ring-tailed lemurs––shrieking, yodelling and cooing. The morning settles in and is deconstructed in an electroacoustic passage featuring percussion and samplers. The raspy, drawn out call of the capuchinbird is one of the featured voices in this section.

2. Day (Track Time: 18’00")
a) Sext (Time: 0’00"-11’50"). The roll of a drum at midday leaves us along the banks of the Samburu River in Northern Kenya. Doves, kingfishers and insects echo across the gently flowing waters. This passage is reiterated 3 times, with the gradual addition and deconstruction of both soundscape material and electroacoustic instruments including sampled Philippine bamboo instruments and David Rothenberg playing a Norwegian overtone flute. The soundscape shifts to Kakamega Forest in Northwestern Kenya. Black and white casqued hornbills call to one another from fruiting trees as do a haunt of flies, clarinet, and human voices. The midday activity continues in the Pantanal, a seasonally flooded swamp with interspersed stands of trees. As the heat mounts, so does the intensity of insect sounds. Much of the splashing come from a species of indigenous caiman, as they thrash for fish which have gathered in the shrinking pools of water that make up the swamp during the dry season. The caiman are joined in the feeding frenzy by Jabiru storks and egrets, among others.
b) None (Time: 11’50"-18’00"). Late afternoon finds us in the Amazon, in a community of screaming pihas. These birds are most often quietly perched in the gallery storey of the forest. The slightest disturbance in their community, such as the snap of a twig underfoot, will cause an eruption of vocal activity. Included here are both the boatswain whistle call which earned them the name of "Captain of the Forest" as well as a more gutteral "wind-up" component of their call. Just as a lone, calling red-tailed hawk is identified with the American West in film, so the screaming piha seems to be one of the classic "jungle" sounds in cinema (sadly, such clichés only reinforce the limited role of listening in our lives). Broad spectra of high frequency insect sounds form a backdrop to the pihas. Some of the bandwidths have been treated electronically, while others have been left as they were from the field recordings. A clarinet and choral voices join with the calls of white-cheeked gibbons and siamangs from Southeast Asia. I also sampled the low tones of siamang calls, which are modulated through manipulation of their throat sac. These were filtered and looped and combined with sampled instruments from the Philippines and an Obokano a chordophone from Kenya. This passage forms a transition to the sounds of a late afternoon soundscape from Berenty in Southern Madagascar. Here fruit bats duet: a morphic resonance of the forest falcons heard in the opening.

3. Dusk (Track Time: 17’10")
a) Collation (Time: 0’00"-3’40"). The twilight hour is announced by breezes. The wind harps which are heard in this passage were recorded in Antarctica––the whispered memory of Pangaea’s forests. The choral piece, Omuyeka (translated as,Wind), is reproduced here in its entirety. It is an original shairi, or Swahili form of spoken verse, written and performed by the Kericho Teachers Choir. The verse is in the Western Kenyan Luo language and describes, "the advantages and disadvantages of wind."
b) Vespers (Time: 3’40"-12’40"). The evening settles in as chorus, synthesizers, and samplers merge with the rhythms of frogs and insects. The latter were recorded in a hanging valley in the mountain rainforest of Ranomafana, in Eastern Madagascar. Here, as elsewhere, unedited soundscape recordings are juxtaposed with sampled deconstructions and musical reworkings which challenge the ear to know imagined places. The soundscape once again shifts, this time to an evening chorus of frogs from a fragment of Atlantic rainforest in Minas Gerais, Brazil.
c) Compline (Time: 12’40"-17’10"). The close of the day brings us back to the place where we started, in Amazônas, Brazil. Insects dominate the soundscape. The clarinet leaves us. A distant potoo is heard.

Amazon Journal (Excerpt)

Amazônas, Brazil––From the platform of a rainforest canopy observatory.
Constellations fade beneath an impressionist wash of first light––muted pinks and grays smear against the ebbing darkness. Equatorial transitions are quick. The sun rises and fog retreats like a veil being slowly pulled across an emerald sea. The swell, troughs and crests of the canopy hint at the lay of the land below. From our vantage above the forest, the drama of awakening unfolds. Our unspoken relief at the dawn is given voice by a group of howler monkeys, whose roaring thunders through the trees. The vocalization is a territorial display by a dominant male from a nearby troop, numbering about 10 individuals. A series of long, low, hollow, howls cascades to a gurgling crescendo. Neighboring alpha males respond and a musical canon measures the extent of boundaries between groups. The black figures seem to float on frozen waves and macaws fly below us––leaving a wake in mist curling through the canopy. The soundscape fills in layers as the chorus is joined by parrots, toucans, fruitcrows, cotingas, cuckoos, and screaming pihas.

The forest is imbued with a primordial resonance: a feeling that sound itself is etched into the forms before us––the ravines, trees, vines and moist corridors. This acoustic imprint is what gives reverberation or echo its limitless embrace. From his cabin on Walden Pond, Henry David Thoreau suggested that, "All sound heard at the greatest possible distance produces in one the same effect, a vibration of the universal lyre, just as the intervening atmosphere makes a distant ridge of earth interesting to our eyes by the azure tint it imparts to it. . . . The echo is, to some extent, an original sound, and therein is the magic and charm of it. It is not merely a repetition of what was worth repeating. . . but partly the voice of the wood."

In selecting sites for ambient recording, I am challenged by topography: in terms of ascertaining acoustic characteristics of habitat and negotiating accessibility. In this case, the tower is a gift rather than a find. Discovery in listening more often assumes a form of personal geomancy: an empirical and intuitive process by which I place myself into receivership, as it were, within a landscape. Wildlife recordings are hard to ‘make,’ to ‘get’ or to ‘take.’ A good recording of the "voice of the wood" is as much a revelation as it is an acquisition. The difference lies in attitude. The disposition of landscape, its features, surfaces and textures, the density of forest, relative humidity and air temperature all mold sound into a distinctive experience. Valleys in the rainforest can often be heard before they are seen. A dawn chorus is the affirmation and cyclical renewal of place. It is a mystical breath, heard as a flourish along a terrestrial meridian. As with the Chinese art of placement, feng shui, finding the right spot is a matter of paying attention to one's surroundings, alignment and juxtaposition.

This morning, the reflective capacity of the canopy and the concentration of wildlife at this level have made for a unique immersion in sound. Despite the struggle with humidity, I am fortunate in my recording. The sun clears the trees. With mounting heat and rising convections, the chorus dissolves into a diffuse din. Insects reestablish the diurnal palette of timbres. By nine o'clock, the exposed platform is like a skillet and a dense cloud of biting flies sends us packing.

Technical Notes

As I consider my work involving the natural soundscape, I feel that the music, as well as the science involved in the recording, are acts of remembering. More than a sentimental backwards glance, I use the word, ‘remember,’ in the sense of putting together again. The process of field recording and composition involves cultivating an empathetic identification with nature, with the understanding that this is an inherited basis of our humanity. Furthermore, remembrance is an aesthetic position from which to explore a more traditional alignment of science and music. I consider ‘music’ in the Pythagorean sense, comprising three aspects: musica mundana, musica humana and musica instrumentalis. Only the last of these do we generally think of as music––the playing of instruments. However, the notion of a ‘musical universe’ lies at the heart of the Western experience and its mythic fabric. From the logos of Genesis, to the Music of the Spheres and the Big Bang, sound is the central metaphor for our cosmology. For the greater part of our history, science and music were complementary avenues of enquiry into notions of our existence and our place in the natural order of things.

In the culture of the marketplace, music becomes an expendable commodity: a product of the entertainment industry. Natural sound is rarely thought of in musical terms. Its commercial viability lies in being fodder for sound effects or for use as a sort of relaxation elixir––offering, in sound, a picturesque or pastoral deliverance from the stresses of modern life. We, as a society, tend to leave music making and sound design to professionals. In so doing, we divest ourselves of a valuable legacy: that music and ‘the call of the wild’ bind us to the resonance of the planet. In a sense, we are all aboriginal voices, "singing the world into existence."
Composing from and with natural sounds is not rigidly defined by existing form or aesthetic canon. It is exploratory and experimental. I am interested in both the aspects of bioacoustics––the study of the sounds of living things––and aesthetic notions ‘music’ and ‘nature.’ I begin with research and extensive planning: how to listen to creatures and soundscapes. Recording sound is a process of observation and collection; it engages a number of sensibilities––from the scientific to the artistic. It is both a highly technical undertaking and, in some ways, touches viscerally on hunting instincts. By researching where I will record, I learn about the habits of creatures, the particulars of their environment and how, when, and why they may vocalize. Learning how to listen is a process of cultivating awareness.

Back in the studio, I often make spectrographs of the sounds I record, in an attempt to visually understand how creatures interact in a given environment. Where voices fit in the frequency spectrum, when in time and space, and how loudly creatures communicate varies from place to place. The sonic signature of a habitat is like a human fingerprint: unique but with characteristic features or morphic resonances. The spectrographs also serve as rough scores for musical ideas. The acoustic characteristics of certain sounds and places are highlighted, along with the wonderful rhythms and textures. I have found these in analyzing my field recordings and allowed them to guide me and suggest various musical directions.

By way of example, insect and bird sound is particularly rich and complex, with many components and harmonics reaching from the lower frequencies to well beyond the upper threshold of human hearing (about 18KHz). After making digital samples from the field recordings, I processed selections using digital and analog filters. The filters were set to resonate, or feedback, slightly at different harmonic intervals––what I refer to as ‘sweet spots’ in the original material. Other recordings, particularly those of frogs, were processed using noise reduction filters. Residual harmonic artifacts, or chaotic debris, were emphasized and remixed with the field recordings along with synthesized creations. By weighting or coloring the noise in some of the more percussive sounds of different creatures, I was able to bring out contrasting and often indeterminate pitches. These were integrated and resynthesized where they related well to source material. As I work with various audio devices, like noise reduction filters, I have been intrigued by both their precision in measuring sound and equally by their limitations. For example, the manner in which complex acoustical information, like a bird melody, is handled by a Pitch-to MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) converter produces wonderfully unpredictible and chaotic results. Sound in nature is less a stately march than it is an improvisation. Even within specific sounds there are many dimensions. In addition to pitch, melody, rhythm and timbre, I am also concerned with the sensation of space from a sonic perspective. The apparent contraction and expansion of aural spaces in Forests: A Book of Hours reflects some of the unique qualities where the field recordings were made. From reverberant rainforest valleys and cliff faces to rivers and streams, sound frequently reveals more about space than we can manage to discern visually. Throughout the composition, I juxtaposed various digital samples with artificial reverberation, in a spatial counterpoint to the echo contained in the source recordings.

I consider the music on this CD a composed set of acoustic images: human voices and instruments, animal songs, calls and the resonance of habitat. As sound, these are facts, artifacts, and fabrications from the natural world.

Acknowledgements

With gratitude to the many musicians, human and animal, who joined me on Forests: A Book of Hours. The choral parts of the composition were created as part of a residency at the University of Eastern Africa in Eldorit, Kenya, with the university choir and Boyd Gibson, Director. Additional vocal and choral parts were abstracted as digital samples from my recordings of the Kenya Music Festival, particularly to the Kericho Teachers Choir, courtesy of Mr. Songon Adwar, Executive Secretary, Kenya Music Festival. David Rothenberg plays clarinet and assorted flutes. The soprano passages in Dusk were sung by Patricia Wulf. Alberto Gaitán plays sampler and processors and Michael Wingo plays assorted percussion, sampler and processors. Additional engineering at Hi-Touch Studios was provided by Steve Antosca and Bruce Tharp. Thanks to Marlon Fuentes and Enrico Obusan for samples of traditional Filipino bamboo and stringed instruments. Special thanks to Klaus Schöning, Director of the Studio Akustische Kunst at Westdeutscher Rundfunk–Köln, Germany who commissioned the radio creation of Forests and finally to Jim Cummings, who brought it to publication on CD.
Cover Photography by Mary Townsend and Douglas Quin.
Photo of Douglas Quin by Mary Townsend.
Graphic Design by Michael Motley.
© P 1998 Bowerbird Music, BMI. All rights reserved.