Monday 17th October
Jez Riley French
Today, we had our second guest lecture of the semester, led by Jez Riley French. Jez is primarily a Field Recorder, who has more recently been working on the recordings of large surfaces and structures, such as buildings and bridges, as well as spaces. To take a look at Jez’s personal bio, cv and previous work, follow this link to his website, or follow his Twitter and SoundCloud, where he uploads many of his works.
Jez began the lecture by talking about contact mics, what they are, how he uses them, and that he creates his own and sells them on his website. He demonstrated the use of contacts mics with his first piece, Teleferica, where he had connected contact mics along a piece of tensioned cable in Italy. The contact mics would then record the sound of insects, leaves and the wind interacting with the cable. I found this piece very interesting, as Jez explained that Dr Alan Lamb had discovered a similar sound when recording an abandoned stretch of telegraph wire. This was particularly interesting because Lamb was contacted by the sound designers working on Star Wars no less, who wanted to use this sound for the laser blasters in the original film. I have embedded Jez’s piece below to illustrate the sound of the laser blasters:
After this, Jez continued by demonstrating his use of hydrophones and coils through other pieces of his work. In one piece, Dissolves, Jez attached hydrophones to the inside of a beaker, filled with slightly acidic water and recorded the sound of dolomites dissolving into this substance, which strangely sounded similar to birdsong. Furthermore, Jez illustrated how he uses geophones, which do not typically record sound, to create sound pieces. He played us an example of what the Earth turning on its axis sounds like, and followed this clip by questioning whether humans could ever perceive infrasound (infra-: sounds below our frequency threshold, ultra: sounds above). Additionally, Jez suggested that ever since the creation of technology and the technology to record sound, ironically our hearing has decreased vastly in the past 100 years. This is due to compression in everyday life, and the fact that sound is presented to the audience, instead of the audience (of whatever – music, film, TV, etc.) having to seek it out for themselves via the use of critical listening. Jez finished the talk by telling us to constantly challenge what we accept to be correct, acceptable or appropriate as sometimes sounds that we do not expect to work can have the biggest impact.
I found this lecture very insightful, as it taught me the excellent, creative uses of unconventional mics to produce sounds we would otherwise not hear. It made me want to go out into the field and record sound, which is reflectively something I do not do enough of, and now that Media Loans has recently purchased hydrophones, we can experiment with these.
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