The Post-Natural Soundscape was a field recording workshop held at SCI-Arc during the 2021 Summer session.

From the beginning, sound recordings of the landscape—or soundscapes as they’ve become known—have overwhelmingly privileged representations of pure nature, free of any human intervention. This was true in 1977 with the publication of R. Murray Schafer’s The Tuning of the World, a book that popularized the idea of the soundscape, and it remains true today with the proliferation of nature sounds used for meditation and in music found across the internet (now a multi-million dollar industry). But—to borrow photographer Robert Adams’ criticism of Ansel Adams—such soundscapes are dishonest. They intentionally obscure the influence of the recordist and crop out wider geographical and political contexts of the landscape. By doing so, they inaccurately represent nature, as something separate from us humans rather than inextricably bound up with our everyday activity.

The workshop, taught at SCI-Arc in Summer 2021, explored the intersection of the human and non-human landscape. Students were guided through the processes of conceiving and creating their own personal sonic landscapes. Throughout the workshop, I conducted listening sessions of works from artists who have used sound to express wider political, social, and subjective critiques. These include Jana Winderen’s hydrophonic recordings of cracking ice and plankton and Peter Cusack’s recordings from Chernobyl and other dangerous places. We discussed the qualities that make these and other pieces so impactful, investigated how they cast a critical eye on the environment, and looked at how each artist inserted their point of view into their recordings. At the end of the workshop, my students presented their pieces during a live online performance. You can watch excerpts of it below.

This workshop was made possible through the support of the Urban Pasts and Futures Lab at SCI-Arc.

Complete List of Final Student Projects