About THE WORK:

Field Recordings, 11 Music Boxes, Transcription Paper, Wood Bench, Fishing Line

ARTIST STATEMENT:

Footprints tell us where we have been. Similarly, soundprints are evidence that something has taken place. Soundprints @ Playa serves as a Collective and Community-based Auditory Ecological Archive, utilizing crowdsourcing to produce a sonic archive, data-base, and a public sound work of site-specific interpretive and translational human responses. 

Soundprints @ Playa takes place at Playa at Summerlake, a large dried lakebed in Lake County, Oregon, that has been affected by climate change. Participants venture into the Playa landscape, and use their smartphone to capture audio and visual data of their location. The sonic recordings serve as auditory “prints” which are then reproduced visually, as a musical score, to be played by a music box. Their score can be a direct translation, or a creative, subjective, or emotional response in dialogue with the surrounding environment. 

Humans become transducers, and their soundprints reveal the diversity of ways people hear, assimilate, collect and utilize sounds.  As we listen, how is the environment durationally, sonically changing? Is it suffering or thriving? How is it different after a fire or drought? Creating musical scores provides agency to reflect back and transcribe the complexity of the natural environment. Regardless of power or wifi, you can use a music box as a sonic first responder to environmental change.

Soundprints @ Playa  is the first piece in a series of long-term citizen soundworks based in Oregon by Dana Reason. Soundworks can take the form of a musical score and composition; a performance; a sonic-selfie; a collection of sound-memories; ecological data collection for future listening; research; and creative practice. Naturalists like Aldo Leopold left for us beautiful written descriptions of the environment. Here, we create a diary of sounds instead of words. Participants become citizen soundworkers–collecting data, making observations of sound, silence, and noise–training us to witness, adapt, advocate for, and understand what Bernie Krause calls the “acoustic signature” of a location.  Together, Soundworks serve as a collective repository and sonic call-to-action  for  “ear-witnessing” (R.Murray Schafer) and “Deep Listening” (Pauline Oliveros).

This research is generously sponsored by Wildfire & Water Collaborative Residency @ Playa https://playasummerlake.org/wildfire-water/