Soundscapes

Environmental spaces, captured by the inner ear of the psyche.

Memory in sound.  Public squares, hometown streets, foreign capitals, secluded haunts.

The mind, with aural sensations and imagery, in motion.

Manner of Knowing

Representations, by nature, are to some degree stylized.

The artist recreates perception of reality, not reality itself.

These tone poems are enhancements of the perceptions of places, given treatments to accent the real and the imaginative, with the aim of elevating atmospheres and states of mind.

Imagined Perspective

Allow free reign to thought and perception.

Observe, and regard possible viewpoints, near and distant.  Consider the sights, sounds, and other sensory impressions that could exist.

Hear.  Listen.  Create.

Listen, Hear

Combine and hold sounds in an encompassing perspective.

Contrast this means of sound design with music in the general sense. Listen to a performance or recording of a musical work repeatedly and later spend an idle hour in a dynamic sound environment away from music.

In each case both active listening and hearing in a passive manner take place: the former is directly occupied with sound while the latter is aware of it at less intense levels, yet still engaged.

Consequently, the listener may find interest waning in the general musical piece with repetition, while the nature of ambient sound design, patterned after that of the dynamic sound environment, continues to retain the listener's attention over time.

Intensity, Degree

The visual and the auditory share varied aspects of impression through the senses.

Regard degrees of color, tone, brightness, shading, and texture, among many others.  The eye and the ear of the imagination recognize their similarities and contrasts.

Subtleties such as these may be realized in expression, given clarity, and elevated beyond the mere glimpse that, more often than not, comes only briefly within notice before vanishing altogether.

Impression, Media, Mind

Completeness of an artistic work is not finality, but part of an expanding continuum.

A work such as a sound design or tone poem, for example, may be heard as an articulation of a single aspect of a composer's broader vision, representing a unity of impression conveyed to the listener who engages the experience in a personal way.  It is the same with poetry, painting, film, dance, and all expressions of this nature.

Over time, and in the context of numerous works, the way of the imagination manifests itself in the manner of dreams, scattering shadows and light as it stirs, changes, and moves again.

Rise, Recede

The experience of sound, as a form of perceptual awareness, varies with the listener. 

It is more than a matter of taste or learned behaviors. Like poetry, it is often considered to be entirely emotional in effect. This is erroneous in both cases; subjective emotions are not the sole measures of aesthetic appeal any more than the sense of moral reason can be the entire basis of judgement in regard to artistic merit, whether in terms of musical composition or poetic expression.

Generic musical forms dominate the attention of the listener.  But the natural capacity of listening--and hearing-- is intrinsic to human awareness, and is capable and worthy of much more than that.

Paradox

Contemplation and insight may inspire the arts as much as external experience.

Give attention to those things considered to be exciting, and they are predictable, inconsequential.

Consider the commonplace, and it is filled with mystery.

Grasp, It Cannot Be Held

The past breathes deeply of the future.

Regardless, the observer considers the limits of conformity that are everywhere apparent, manifestations of emotion over reason and nostalgia for appearances that never existed. 

Look and listen beyond the horizon, perceive and think forward, and thereby create tomorrows.

Concept, Material

Sounds converge, are perceived by the listener, evoke moods, and enhance environments.

In the creation of these sounds and combinations, the composer must listen with fullness of mind and being, forming auditory imagery out of experience, perception, idea and emotion while coming to terms with process and potential.

From steam to ice, steel to gossamer, luminous to obscure, aspects of sound are awakened in elements of creative vision.

Silence and Foresight

Consider the aims and efforts of musicians and composers in the nineteenth, seventeenth, or thirteenth century; think beyond those times to the sounds of joy and lament at the dim edges of prehistory, before Homer and Herodotus seized upon their culture's vision, poetry, and memory.

Hear those sounds in the inner ear of imagination.

The sharpening of a bronze blade.  The voices of children chanting nonsense at a well or stream.  Hymn and harpsichord, lute and drumbeat; the bullroarer, reed flute, gong, and wind chime, violin, trumpet, and bell.

Such sounds, and the thoughts and actions of those who brought them to life, are at the heart of the sound of this day and this moment, now in the twenty-first century and into the far distance beyond.

Chronological Development, Total Effect

Unity and completeness are expressed through interdependence of elements.

The central effects of ambient musical works may be experienced as objective asethetic qualities made present in environments, and subjectively, as works designed especially for a combination of active listening and passive hearing conducive to thoughtful and reflective activities.  Each series and sequence of tones and patterns, each cluster of notes, every sound texture, dynamic subtlety, and shade of instrumental color contributes to the mood and tone of the composition.

Additionally, in terms of historical forces, the meanings and implications of any specific piece by an artist are found with reference to the works that come before and after it, and included in this process of understanding are the creations of other relevant artists, regardless of the media in which they express themselves.

Legacies

Impressionists and composers of tone poems merge sensory perceptions and atmospheric environments; cubists and jazz artists connect with perspectives on time and space.

After the wars, renewal, upheaval, and change.  Rethinking the popular arts, and the degrees to which they disconnect from the fine, or serious, arts.  Ideological conflicts.  Shifts in conscience, sensibility, and consciousness.  Expansion of media and technology.  The modern and the passing of the postmodern, with the questions asked from time immemorial remaining.

Scattered throughout, simplicity, virtue, clarity of reason, intellectual integrity, imagination, visions of individual freedom and artistic originality, combining with like historical forces to drive their realities into the moment. 

Labyrinth

Examine patterns of movement over hours and days, lifetimes and centuries.

Within those patterns are sounds in infinite forms, combined and dispersed, perceived according to physical motion as well as change over time and distance.  Consider the idea of musical works that are based upon observations such as these, rather than upon rhythm, melody, repetition, and other elements to which the listener is accustomed.

Initially, the listener may find the music to be apparently formless, yet as the sounds continue they may be established as having both orderly development and aesthetic beauty.  Myriad variations in textures and tones, densities and dynamics, clusters and patterns of notes, and combinations of instrumental color connect in ways that are uncommon in popular musical forms, but omnipresent in the human and natural environments.

How fitting that the internal structure of the ear is called the labyrinth.

Range

Where the burden of limits does not apply, the extent of perception is unknown.  Such places are those of the imagination, and of dreams.

To listen inwardly and outwardly, to hear the connectivity of sense and reason, to formulate and execute concrete vibrations in terms of abstract images conceived in the mind, expresses meaning in a language of tone, conveyed through the art of sound.

Tone and Hue

Give color to atmospheres, emotions, and states of mind.

Concepts designed to convey such impressions may vary from the complex and highly stylized to the minimalistic and unadorned. The classical Indian raga brightens and shades the mood of hours and seasons according to principles combining improvisation and form, while Gregorian chant resonates with dense tones and textures centered on vocal phrases and melodies.  Each represents a unique perspective.

Ambient music is designed to tint and illuminate atmospheres as well, in ways as individual in nature as its composers.

Simplicity, Variation, Complexity

Minor combinations of elements transform the whole of a sound design in significant ways.

Every alteration, in tone, texture, or dynamics, for example, has the effect of creating currents of sound and movement that expand throughout the work, like ripples in still water. 

Consequently, while the composer facilitates, balances, enhances, and experiments, there must be no interference, or as little intervention as possible, in the process of the design's movement toward completeness.

Impermanence

Acclimate to sounds not meant to be grasped, to music not subject to being internalized?

All things are different today than they were yesterday, and they will be different tomorrow.  As all things return to their source and find different forms, ultimately to grow and change, decline and rise once more, so the sounds of life come and go in all ways, and perspectives change.

Painting became nonrepresentational, film and literature, nonlinear, before once again flowing, as do all the arts, in diverse directions. Music changes, as does culture, with listeners, and listening as well.

Transference

Aware of culture and history, the observer senses source and origin in music beyond style and genre.

The contemporary traces an arc to the ancient; the imaginative, to the nature of perception and idea.

Beyond ordinary limits, the listener perceives directly, clearly discerning the authentic, the true, and the meaningful.

Merging

What may be sensed, seen and heard, felt emotionally or physically, whether incisively clear or through a glass, darkly, may be imagined, expanded, brought into being and contemplated in terms of meaning.

Transforming and manipulating sound, tone, and dynamic movement suggests impressions that may recall experience-- shoreline in Maine, street in Boston, summer evening in Palatka or Santa Monica--and evoke prescient anticipation of awareness yet to approach consciousness, illuminating, in the moment, possibilities of the future.