Research project

Topologies: from field recording to phonography and the virtual

The insights leading to the present project firstly manifested themselves in 2008, when I worked with field recordings on the basis of relatively well-established notions in music composition studies, such as ‘musical material’ and écriture. With hindsight, I understand the outcomes of those first experiments as indication of sound’s ‘irreducibility’ (echoing artist and theorist Rodolfo Caesar, who suggests that “the task of accounting for [sounds’] meanings, complexities, scope and connotations through translations, approximations, schematics, analogies or other 'reductions' is endless”). Embracing this irreducibility, I will explore field recording as an activity that has the potential to create “transaction spaces”, facilitating exchanges and negotiations both between diverse practices that use sound as a relevant component (such as ‘music composition’ and ‘fieldwork registering’) and notions usually presented as dichotomic (‘abstract sounding’, ‘documental rhetorics’, etc.). How can those transaction spaces be explored? And how far can we stretch them, without jeopardizing field recording’s identity?

Contact

Paulo de Sousa Dantas