FIELDWORK AS FREQUENCY MARTIN PARKER
A/S/N
Sound and light are both categorised by their wavelength within the field of electromagnetic radiation. This can be described as a field. As Academic Director of Sound Design at the University of Edinburgh, Artistic Director of Edinburgh’s Dialogues festival, and a composer who focuses on encounters between computers, people and places, how do you engage with the notion of fieldwork as a creative reference point? MP Fieldwork
is a necessary part of almost any creative act but the scale and time frame of it is different with each piece and for each project. For me, fieldwork can take the form of measuring a space and finding the best place to position a loudspeaker. This can happen just before a concert, within a very short timescale. However, a much longer period of fieldwork can take place when the material of the performance piece is going to be directly influenced by it, through location recording, or rehearsing with other musicians. Another element of fieldwork that can affect the musical material directly can take place through the development of a sound processing system. Information about a room, a space or place will be researched and then converted into data that is subsequently mapped to sound manipulation parameters in a live performance or sound installation. I’ve yet to work with electromagnetic radiation directly although I’ve enjoyed the work of Christina Kubisch, whose sound installations involve the unmasking of electromagnetic interference by bringing it into the sound domain through specially engineered headphones.
A/S/N As a
composer, would you say that research and an empirical understanding of a location is vital to your work, and to what extent do you enter a cultural and musicological consciousness to absorb this influence?
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