A Day in the Life
Thor McIntyre-Burnie Sound installation artist, sound designer and director of public arts company Aswarm — is he out of his tree?
7
.30am and I don’t feel I slept a wink, the night serenaded by rain drops falling from the canopy above onto this tin caravan roof; I’m also feeling somewhat invigorated, because I’m out working in the wilderness with an amazing company of creative folk for ten days in the whirligig woods of Cheshire. 8am We have four vertical dancers (aerialists), to rig on counterbalance lines from a glorious 500 year-old oak, but before that myself and rigger Simon have to figure out how to get six speakers 30’ up into its canopy. I want to animate this tree with periphonic sound. I’m here with one of the UK’s most experienced aerial dancer/ choreographers Lindsey Butcher, and we’re collaborating, co-directing a week of R&D for a project called A Heightened Sense of Tree. An idea inspired both by the concept of ‘Psithurism’ (the sound of wind in trees) and Lindsey’s performing in Canadian Red woods. We received Arts Council funding, initially in partnership with the National Trust in the New Forest.. 9am I’ve positioned two RCF Monitor 8s, one at the root bass, and one 20’ up the trunk, these will provide the core vertical plane and the 8” drivers some sub heft. Rigger Simon flings throw lines out from 40’ up in the canopy to midway along the taller branches, from which we haul up RCF Monitor 5s, then two lighter Control Ones on lower, wider, outrigging branches. The effect is the ability to shift sound up from the roots out to the branches, mimicking the tree 50 / Autumn 2020
sap path, and suck sound in like CO2 from the leaves down into the roots. Perched atop on old school desk rigged with an umbrella taped to a stick that fits perfectly into the ink well (it’s the little things), my MacBook pro, Logic and trusty old FA-101 soundcard fire up, and with a ‘whoop’ of delight it works! Although it is of course only one of ten different trees we’ll be working with — octopus week! In this instance my aim is to animate the tree so that it can work both as a stand-alone installation to walk around and also for the dancers to perform within. This illustrates my work with sound. I work best site-responsively. My career grew from pulling apart old TV’s on a Fine Art Degree in the ‘90s and becoming fascinated by how sound, when separated from its complicit partner of the screen, works with places, objects and context — and then how multiple channels of sound can create scenarios for audiences to walk within and ‘physically explore’ listening. A Music Tech course later I found myself doing a second line of work, sound design for theatre, dance and son et lumière in the arts festival sector, currently scuppered by COVID… 12 noon and I’m trying to squeeze in a group Skype meeting before lunch, about another project marking the 40th anniversary of the Brixton uprising of 1981, with Border Crossing Festival bringing Aboriginal Australian song writer Jessie Lloyd to work with Asher Senator (Smiley Culture) and various local groups. My task being to create a way for songs, cultural stories and voices to permeate from a network of key buildings. I’m trying to articulate how a combination of GPS-tagged audio apps and Aboriginal inspired painting on the pavement could work, when I realise my battery charging cable has failed and I’ve left the caravan door open… amidst a flurry of feathers, squawks, expletives and apologies, I try unsuccessfully to flush two over inquisitive chickens out, as my phone battery goes… 2pm I’m in a circle of tree’s trying to record a poet in between rain showers before his train departs. The aim being to cut-up his prose around a circle of speakers positioned at the base of each
tree, that will respond to a suspended speaker and 18” cymbal (with transducer) which swing like two pendulums in the circle between, from a catenary between trees high above. I’m enjoying how the recorded patter of rain on leaves phases between these two oscillating sources, the latter percussively playing the cymbal with rain both live and recorded. 6pm I’m being hauled up a line, back in the old Oak, juggling a Sennheiser 416 on a pole, MKE Platinum lavs on my head exploring the spatial soundscape: sub aqua water gurgles up the trunk, single thuds and pops of small pyro (which I recorded in a tube) burst up and whistle out onto the limbs, as long breaths (recorded in a hugely resonant space in Lebanon years earlier) suck air in, down, and out — like the tree breathing. Up here floating in the canopy, my thoughts turn to a concurrent project inspired by the altered sense of hearing lockdown gave us — The Diasonix Project. An online activity and game which asks two isolated people to play a form of ‘spot the difference’, but with their ears, each listening to one side of a pair of soundscapes with subtle differences between them. Created by five sound artists I commissioned with the help of emergency ACE funding in response to how they were hearing the world differently during lockdown. The project is an attempt to explore new ways of working with disparate ‘self-isolating’ audiences. Now I want to make a soundscape from up here! 11pm Having successfully tried plunging and then hauling an upturned dancer headfirst into a vat of water, side-lit, so that drips fall from her hair like an inked brush tracing the trunk, we’ve found an image that works gorgeously with the sound. Now for steaming mugs, boots too close to the fire, deadcat windshields under redhead lamps — perusing forecasts and plotting the next day ahead. Thor’s Website: www.aswarm.com Diasonix project: www.aswarm.com/diasonix2/