The Voice of the Land brings together the rich tapestry of sounds and visuals from the local natural landscape through real-time audiovisual processing. Emerald Holt created a unique personal view of the Okanagan environment through an exhibition that became a vessel for collaborative and poetic exchange and opened meaningful approaches for shared or individual appreciation of our local sonic and visual landscape through visual music expressions.
Visually, The Okanagan landscape was abstracted and pieced together in a variety of simultaneous video streams from multiple viewpoints, each one projected on multiple screens installed in the gallery space, to create a depth of field and perception in time and space. This visual technique Holt employed is similar to David Hockney’s Joiners, which are like a temporal montage of shifting footage, and puzzles viewers with anticipation in a similar experience of being in nature. The screens were hung in shapes and patterns that correspond to non-representational musical expressions similar to Wassily Kandinsky, but use visual material derived from the landscape. The type of field research that Holt carried out is essential for developing an experienced understanding of the Okanagan typography, and each screen reveals a specific location, whether it be from local creeks, lakes, or ponds. Each place inspired Holts interest in the diverse experiences of aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems.
The work shifted from one season into the next. The changes in seasons were observable in many ways, but colour is one aspect that Holt found most visually inspiring. Colour strengthens the temporal dynamics of the landscape and signifies the visual transitions and reflexive state of the seasons during specific times of the year in the Okanagan. For example, the ripe juicy berries of the Wild Saskatoon in summer have key ecological and cultural associations, as do many other plants such as the Wild Chokecherries, Red Elderberries, and Red Raspberries that feed the wildlife in the region. The natural rhythms of the landscape were explored through the vivid display of seasonal colour ranges, which were part of the methods used to develop the animated visual media for this project.
As Holt is interested in the local soundscapes of the area, it was important for her to consider what Pierre Schaefer coined “sonorous objects,” which are sound objects that function autonomously from their own noise, (an example being recorded sounds on live radio technologies). Similarly, his aim was to reproduce music without the physical instrument, and this led to his developing the concept of “acousmatic listening”.
Image courtesy fo the artist.
This division between sound and object relates to how we navigate the natural landscape. Often in nature, we hear before we see, such as hearing the snap of a branch in the stillness of the forest and wonder, ‘what made that noise?’, hearing the Screech Owl pierce the silence of night with its high-pitch shrill, hearing the ice breaking on a frozen lake on a sunny winter day, or hearing the residual sound of a noisy airplane as you look up into the sky to try and trace its whereabouts. In her own approach, sound is the best vehicle for understanding the multimodal sensory streams of the land. This approach for deciphering the mysteries of sounds of the landscape through marvel and wonder for nature is necessary for understanding the audible life forms of the land.
The microtonal nuances and dynamic inflection of the bird’s vocal character are reflected in the variety of tonal techniques employed by each musician (the cellist, flutist, and pianist). This compositional method highlighted the specific tonal environment associated to each bird Holt chose for each season, such as the Robin and Northern Mockingbird to name a few. For this project Holt hired two musicians, concert cellist and composer Nicholas Denton Protsack (San Francisco Conservatory of Music) and classical flutist Emily Richardson (The University of British Columbia School of Music) to instrumentally interpret each bird song she had recorded. She asked them to mirror the bird’s unique vocal abilities by using their instrumental techniques and musical expertise. Holt showed them the spectrograms she made from the birdsong and asked them to record their interpretations, either as full song sets or song syllables.
Concerning how Holt combined audio and visuals from the Okanagan landscape, she mapped the particular colour range of seasons with the specific soundscapes to create a cohesive method that bridges the relationship between colour and sound in the Okanagan. This approach calls to attention the temporal associations of climate and region, more importantly, communicates how we share the shifting landscape with many animal and plant co-habitants and how these non-human life forms contribute to our vivid perception of place and reality. More than a visual music installation, The Voice of the Land brings viewers a unique immersive space to reflect on their relationship with nature.
The Voice of the Land was on view in the Members’ Gallery from January 29 to February 20 as part of the Living Things International Arts Festival.