Yiorgis Sakellariou

Yiorgis Sakellariou在研討會的論文發表： https://youtu.be/c9ZqBqLP4Kw

River Sounds: The Mythology of Eternal Flow in Electroacoustic Composition

Abstract

The talk discusses and analyses the concepts and processes of composing “Neris”, an electroacoustic composition consisting of field recordings from Neris river in Lithuania. The composition explores the connection between music-making and mythology. The practice-based research musically interrogates the mythological meanings of rivers and water: the eternal flow and the notion of death and rebirth.

The composition of “Neris” is not a mere study and collection of information about the homonymous river but an empirical interaction where listeners can discover the extraordinary in the mundane, where the familiar water sounds trigger an immersive experience of transition and contemplation. “Neris” encourages active listening with the aim to discover the powerful meanings of mythology and to perceive the river as an active force, a constantly flowing energy through which human beings can connect with a mysterious mythological Cosmos.

Link to composition https://riversssounds.org/neris

Key words: field recordings, mythology, electroacoustic composition, active listening, soundscapes, interactive interfaces

Introduction

I will discuss and analyse the concepts and processes of composing “Neris”, an electroacoustic work consisting exclusively of field recordings from Neris river in Vilnius, Lithuania. “Neris” is part of Riversssounds, a platform for virtual sonic experiences and an online residency program. The composition explores the connection between music-making and mythology and interrogates the mythological meanings of rivers and water: the eternal flow and the notion of death and rebirth. This is my first consideration, to respond to the title of the symposium. The second consideration will be about the experience of online listening to a musical work, as I will be raising some questions about its function and value.

To briefly introduce my practice and research interests, my fundamental artistic questions are mainly concerned about the relationships between sound, environments, fellow practitioners, and audiences. Through my work I explore the way music is used to connect the material with the supernatural world. The aim is to intensify the transcendental power of music and challenge the listener’s perception of reality. In other words, I use sound to invoke spirit worlds.  In addition, and it is crucial to highlight, I am interested in the communication between people living in the physical world and how they bond together through the communal experience of listening to a musical piece.

Mythology

In recent years, I have been interested in the connection between music-making and mythology. As author Karen Armstrong explains, mythology teaches human beings to see beyond the tangible world into a reality that embodies something else – the “wholly other” as historian of religion Mircea Eliade has called it.

Moreover, a myth cannot be successful if it focuses only on the supernatural; it must be concerned with humanity, its truth will be revealed only through ritual and practice. Mythology is not about analysing facts and numbers but about enabling and empirically understanding human behaviour and emotions. A myth, therefore, is not a fairy tale or a representation of something else. It is an organ of reality that, similarly to listening to music, comes into being through performance and immediate experience. Accordingly, during the process of field recording around Neris and composing the work in the studio, I examined the mythological meanings of rivers and water, one of my main sources of sonic material.

To begin with, water has always contained powerful symbolisms concerning life and death. In Christianity, baptism signifies the beginning of life and also gives a strong sense of belonging in a community. In the Muslim world, washing is essential to prepare one’s body for the activity of the spirit. In India, Ganges is still imagined as a milky way that transformed into a river. Coming directly from the sky, the river establishes a connection between heaven and earth. Moreover, in Finnish mythology, the Tuori river is a passage to Tuonela, the realm of the dead. Similarly, according to Greek mythology, the rivers Styx and Acheron were crossed by the souls of the dead to reach the Underworld.

Mythologies around the world show that rivers are inhabited by ancient spirits, nymphs and other water creatures, indicating a divine presence in nature. Rivers signify a journey between worlds, they are thresholds, borders, liminal spaces that fuel human imagination with awe and wonder. In its turn, water includes all possibilities of existence. To immerse into it is to dissolve all forms, it implies both death and rebirth.

Field Recording

In my practice, I negotiate the notion of birth, death and rebirth via listening, field recording and composing; all methods of a continuous circle of discovering. In the words of ethnomusicologist Steven Feld, “field recording is an act of questioning the world by listening to it”. In this spirit, field recording is not only an exploration of a physical environment – Neris, in my case – but also a way of perceiving the environment, a method of connecting with it.

Furthermore, to record is not simply to document, or represent reality, but to interact with it, to engage in a very profound way. The focus shifts from the physically perceived and geographically defined natural environment to the galloping imagination that is stimulated by the interactions with it.

As a recording location, Neris has a distinct sonic character, including diverse musical qualities, some gentle and comforting, others sinister and ominous. Consequently, the recording of the river was not a mere study and collection of sounds from Neris but an empirical interaction where I discovered the extraordinary in the mundane. Where the familiar city that I live in, transmutes into a space for dialogue and contemplation.

Studio Work

These transmutations continue during studio work. When I return to the studio with my recordings, I ask: How is the identity of the recorded sounds affected by the transition from field to the studio? How are their qualities transformed?

Electronic music composer and sound designer Kim Cascone argues that the recording of a natural soundscape (e.g. a forest) cannot capture the complete experience of listening on location, regardless of its technical quality. When the recordist returns to the studio, he or she listens to fragmented and codified data, reproduced through the loudspeakers, but misses what Cascone calls “the soul of the forest”. He describes the playback of the data as a reanimation of the recorded material, as the way in which the practice of field recording contributes, perhaps unknowingly, to the theme of resurrection, the overcoming of death, that has been described in numerous mythical stories throughout history and around the globe.

Indeed, recording promises immortality and that was exactly what originally excited people when the phonograph, the first recording device, was invented by Thomas Edison in 1877. As a result, working with recorded environmental sounds is signifying a transition from one world and being reborn into another – which makes me think of rivers again, and their mysterious mythologies.

Moreover, when I work in the studio, I do not perceive the field recordings as “sound objects”, to use the Shaefferean term, but as sonic events that every time they are reproduced, they release a floating and dynamic energy that affects the playback environment and its listeners. By embracing the acousmatic tradition, I consider recorded sounds to have their independent ontological value. Therefore, I am always a bit hesitant to talk about the sound “of” something – the sound of rain, the sound of a bird, the sound of a train. I do not wish to reduce sound to a secondary quality of an object or action.

In this spirit, the field recordings of my composition are not simply the sound “of” Neris river. That is because listening is a holistic and synaesthetic experience, a poetic act, the construction of a here-and-now sound-mediated reality, expanding between the tangible and the elusive.

Interaction

I would now like to examine the second consideration and share some thoughts about the interactive interface that accommodates the works of Riversssounds. The project invites listeners to navigate the rivers of Europe and it is described as a virtual portal for connecting the physical realities of different cities through sound. The interface aims to resemble the condition of listening on location where one can move around, change orientation, and decide on which sounds to focus from an individual perspective. Practically, by interacting with the interface, the listeners can make their own variations of the works by adjusting the volume of different tracks, perhaps even adding reverb, delays and filters.

When the Riversssounds curators presented this interface to me, I immediately thought about Glenn Gould and his idea of participant listeners. Already in the 1960s, the celebrated and innovative pianist had envisioned sound playback technologies that would convert the listener into a collaborator. Or, to use his words into: “an associate whose tastes, preferences and inclinations alter peripherally the experiences to which he gives his attention”. The participant listener, Gould continues, “transforms the work, and his relation to it, from an artistic to an environmental experience”.

I can suspect that Gould would be interested in the Riversssounds interface and the possibilities it opens for the interaction between sound work and listener. With Riversssounds there is an attempt to breakdown the composer/audience distinction. Listeners are responsible, in a very individualistic way, for adjusting the works to their personal taste. However, I must insist on asking: Are they still “listeners” or, perhaps, they have transformed into “users” of the interface? Or what Gould called “potential usurpers of power, uninvited guests”? Composing for and interacting with the Riversssounds interface encourages this questioning about musical meaning and value in the online realm.  

Furthermore, it is argued that nowadays the artistic aim is the production of demand, rather than content. Ensuring, or, at least, hoping we will get someone’s attention on the internet is becoming an integral part of artistic and musical practices. Decades after Gould’s considerations, what is now a main point of interest is what social theorist Jacques Attali called the “spectacle of oneself”; that is the ultimate functionality. In addition, Attali underlines that meaning in music is in function, in the signification of elements combined together. He is not referring to aesthetic function, which he considers a modern aim, but to the effectiveness of participants in a social regulation.

I argue that to enable this function, this effectiveness, music, same as mythology, needs ritual. Musicologist Christopher Small claims that ritual is the mother of all arts. Ritual is enacted in performance and shapes art into form. Therefore, ritual is the instrument of music-making that simultaneously provides a meaning to it. That is to stimulate a social connection and a wider understanding of the world in a collective way. So, the question is once again raised: how is that possible in virtual environments?

Back at the end of the 20th century, when the World Wide Web was growing in phenomenal speed, author and “cyber-guru” Erik Davies observed that “detached from a common vision of public space and shared intellectual culture, online society becomes a hive of virtual communities made up of solitary souls”. He also added that we inhabit not a universe but a multiverse in which it is difficult, if not dangerous to navigate.

The thoughts of Davis may be pessimistic but, for me at least, they are an invitation to challenge the understanding of virtual environments and interactive tools in an attempt to, firstly, discover revised values in music and, secondly, establish, if possible, additional ways of connecting communities. This symposium is also a great example of such an opportunity: We are together-alone, present-absent in an event that we usually experience under different conditions.

Conclusion

To conclude, or at least attempt to tie things together. Anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss has explained that in modern times music has taken over the emotional and intellectual functions originally served by mythology. As we continue moving a great deal of musical practice into cyberspace, can we preserve the conditions for musical myth or invent new ones? Can we perform common actions, rituals, to share a sense of discovery and meaning? 

I hope that your engagement with my work on Neris and listening to it through the Riversssounds platform will be a mythical journey of discovery and transformation. Nonetheless, I am concerned that this solitary activity, regardless how user-friendly or intuitive it can be, will not be as profound as a shared listening experience of the work, being together at the same space and the same time.

I still encourage you to listen online, but I hope in the future we will have an opportunity to collectively perform a ritual and generate our own myths.

Yiorgis Sakellariou, July 2021

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