FIELD RECORDING | SOUND ARCHIVE
“I am a composer. I recycle sound. I recycle sound that is ignored. Sound that passes unheard. That is not listened to. I pick up the pieces that have not been heard. The child’s voice and the traffic. The music and the muzak. The melody and the word. I take the sounds in because they enter relentlessly. Listen to them carefully. And find meaning in them…”
– Hildegard Westerkamp, Fragmented Thoughts on Radio Ecology.
I offer workshops dedicated to listening, field recording and tuning in to environmental sound for beginner and advanced levels. I also give lectures or seminars based on my research interests: birdsong, biosemiotics and mimicry ; chronobiology and sonic markers in nature-culture environments ; rhythmanalysis and urban soundscapes ; slow recording and time manipulations, etc.
I have taught in DIY spaces like Refuge Worldwide (Berlin, DE), Couvent Levat (Marseille, FR) as well as institutions like Hasso-Plattner Institute Potsdam (DE), Universität der Künste Berlin (DE), and Technische Universität Berlin (DE).
“RALLYE A LENTIOUREL”
BROADCAST ON FANGO RADIO, 2024
Rallye à Lentiourel, 12’59
France, autoproduction, 2024
Broadcast on Fango Radio’s Off-Air program, curated by Francesco Toninelli.
Cosa succede su Fango Radio quando non suona Fango Radio?
What happens on Fango Radio when Fango Radio isn’t playing?
About the piece:
Heard from the hills of Aveyron, southern France. From the farmlands of Lentiourel, there nothing to see, but the sunday morning has now become surrounded by a speed rallye of motorbikes and tuning cars. The voices of the engines roar around us –but the birds and insects in the fields continues their early summer life. Funnily enough, the friends who host the community at the Oasis de Lentiourel, including the microtonal musician Jacques Dudon, call this field la prairie des mille voix, or “the meadow of a thousand voices”.
>> Listen to Rallye à Lentiourel and the Off-Air archive here.
SOUNDMAP PROJECT:
SUDAMERICA 2024
A collection of recordings made by diane barbé & selu herraiz in 2024, starting in Valparaíso, Chile (hosted by the Tsonami community), continuing in the Atacama desert via Copiapo, Pan de Azúcar, Socaire, and San Pedro de Atacama, and moving through Bolivia via Oruro, Cochabamba, and the Parque Nacional Madidi.
The sounds contribute to Aporee’s global and open-source sound map.
All sounds are licensed CC BY-NC-SA, which means that we are happy if people download them and use them if you give proper credits (BY) only for non-commercial use (NC) and in the same terms (SA, meaning that through your project, others may also then reuse the sounds freely for non-commercial purposes, and so on).
>> find the full archive here.
SLOW LISTENING PERFORMANCE:
EL FIN DE LOS DIAS
El fin de los días is a protocole for slow listening developed in the quebradas of Valparaíso.
It focuses on extremely slow movements and long recordings to experience the end of the day, when the sunlight fades out. Depending on our awareness, this moment may feel long or short, fleeting or suspended in time. It is part of a methodology of urban mapping, developed during a residency at Tsonami –Centro de Arte Sonoro in Valparaíso, Chile.
>> Read our article, Tartamudeos, published on Tsonami Ediciones.
A compilation of experiences, ideas, thoughts, moments, sensations, feelings and states of mind during my stay in Valparaiso. Two voices mix here, the green and the blue, the ocean and the ravine.
VA – HARKENING CRITTERS
on forms of minutiae (fom12, 2024)
forms of minutiae presents ‘harkening critters’, the label’s second non-profit compilation of field recordings and soundscape compositions highlighting, this time, the incredible variety of animal signals.
Stemming from the archaic verb “harken” which means “to listen” or “to give respectful attention to”, indeed, this gathering of contributions from 32 field recordists and sound artists from across the world tunes in to the plethora of vocalizations, mechanical emanations, and any other acoustics phenomenon produced by animals.
>> listen to the full album via forms of minutiae’s bandcamp here.
LIVE BROADCAST FROM ITAPARICA, BRASIL:
REVEIL 2024
Ilha da Itaparica, Bahía, Brasil
URL: itaparica_bahia_brasil.mp3
Streamer(s): Diane Barbé
Broadcast time (your location UTC+2):
SAT 10:21 – SAT 10:42
Broadcast time (stream location UTC-3):
SAT 05:21 – SAT 05:42 (Civil Twilight – Sunrise)
Coordinates: -12.88590°, -38.67704°
Reveil (2014—) is a collective production by streamers at listening points around the earth. Starting on the morning of Saturday 4 May in South London near the Greenwich Meridian, the broadcast will pick up feeds one by one, tracking the sunrise west from microphone to microphone, following the wave of intensified sound that loops the earth every 24 hours at first light.
Streams come from a variety of locations and situations, at a time of day when many people are unaccustomed to be up and out, but sounds are vivid, especially in Spring. The Reveil broadcast makes room by largely avoiding speech and music, gravitating to places where human and non human communities meet and soundworlds overlap.
Each stream adds to and alters the loop.
REVEIL has become a habit and a practice of sharing sounds of places as first light arrives.
>> archive will be available shortly via Reveil’s soundtent website.
Recôncavo ao Redor
Broadcast at Festival Suraural 2024
Recôncavo ao Redor, 9’37
Brasil, autoproduction, 2024
In its sixth edition, the “Sur Aural Festival 2024” aims to investigate the silent languages of nature and the cosmos. After five versions opening portals between past, present and future times, in this version we propose to question the relationship between nature and culture and then predict the possibilities of a rebirth with “Organic Intelligence”.
We investigate these concepts to create a vibratory unison in harmony with the whole.
After the call issued in April 2024, Sur Aural has selected from a hundred works: 91 sound works belonging to 85 artists and collectives of 16 nationalities from around the world!
From July 1 to 13, 2024, you will be able to listen to a new broadcast every day with the invoked works, in addition to a special broadcast for July 20 as an epilogue to our broadcasts.
About the piece, Recôncavo ao Redor:
Recôncavo ao Redor is based on recordings taken around the island of Itaparica, on the Bahia de Todos os Santos, in Brasil (also known as the Recôncavo Bahiano). It is a poetic reflection on the sonic realms that have surrounded me during a two-month residency in the Instituto Sacatar, a space which seems secluded but where the acoustic environment resonates with all the life of the island, from choirs of tropical crickets and crying frogs (Razinha choradeira) marking the unpaved streets, beach bars blasting reggae and pagode, football game celebrations, derelict neon lights, and a low, ominous drone that almost always lured on the acoustic horizon, toward the water. This drone became an obsession, because it felt like it was adding a strange texture to the humid air, and it was very confusing to know where it was coming from, or what was producing it. It seemed to be oozing from the waters of the Recôncavo, which is also home to South America’s largest industrial port and petrochemical facilities…
>> find the full archive here.
SOUND INSTALLATION:
‘Flussgeschichten | River Stories’
at Radduscher Hafen, Spreewald &
Holzmarkt, Berlin
In recent months, artists, scientists and residents have explored a small village in the middle of the Spreewald between rivers, barges and trees. Their research culminated in a two-day art and science festival in the small village of Raddusch. This resulted in multimedia installations, performances and audio walks. The works, stories, ideas and impressions were then transported to Berlin. With the help of the actor that connects the Spreewald with the capital – the Spree.
But what does it mean to bring these impressions and representations to someone else? Which stories are heard and which are lost? How can one – beyond the anthropocentric perspective – also include non-human actors?
In the installation ‘River Stories | In the project ‘River Stories’, artists from the fields of theater, sound and stage design as well as scientists from the Humboldt University of Berlin (HU), the Technical University of Berlin (TU) and the Free University of Berlin (FU) address these questions, the river and all its dimensions.
Works by Oliver Rossol, Steven Lehmann, Jonas Dahm, Diane Barbé, Julia Ihls, Marius Probst, Klemens Czurda, Sven Bühler, Camila Ivana Vargas Pardo, Omar Sherif, Desirée Hetzel, Zora, Patricia Usée, Maximilian Grünewald and Pauline Münch are shown.
The project is a cooperation between the theater collective AnthroposEx and the experimental laboratory AnthropoScenes and is funded by the Berlin University Alliance as part of the Excellence Strategy of the federal and state governments. It was shown during the Berlin Art & Science Week at Holzmarkt25 in October 2023.
Read a review by Olena Slobodian & Pauline Münch on w/k – Zwischen Wissenschaft & Kunst, online journal for art & science (in German).
BOG MUSIC
presented at the Universitätsbibliothek Berlin,
Preisverleihung zur Bibliothek des Jahres 2022
Field recordings and soundscape compositions presented in spectrogram format at the Universitätsbibliothek of the TU and UDK Berlin for the ceremony of the Library of the Year Awards 2022. The award certificate was presented at the ceremony in the shared library building in Berlin-Charlottenburg by Volker Heller, the Federal Chairman of the German Library Association, and Dr. Thomas de Maizière, the Chairman of the Board of the Deutsche Telekom Foundation. The laudatory speech was given in a joint discussion with the moderator Ninia LaGrande, the Vice President for Research and Appointments at TU Berlin, Prof. Dr. Stephan Völker, and the President of the UdK Berlin, Prof. Dr. Norbert Palz. The event was accompanied by music from the UdK sound artist Diane Barbé.
>> Some impressions from the ceremony here.
ON A GREEN HILL,
Coup de coeur du Centre Wallonie Bruxelles
Prix Découvertes Pierre Schaeffer 2022
Diane Barbé, On a Green Hill
7’35, autoproduction, Allemagne
On a Green Hill est une petite exploration bucolique d’un monde multi-espèce, refuge d’animaux informel et anti-productiviste de la Forêt Noire, construit de bric et de broc par un vieux paysan qui ne demande rien aux bêtes qui l’entourent. J’ai voulu rendre hommage à cet espace liminal, décentrer le point d’écoute peu à peu pour rentrer dans l’intimité de ces bêtes velues ou plumées, qui nous entoure d’odeurs de poil chaud et de foin frais.
Tissant ensemble musique expérimentale, recherche biophonique et activisme, Diane Barbé cherche à trouver des formes de résonance et de collaboration interespèces par le biais du sonore.
>> Retrouver toutes les archives du Prix Phonurgia Nova ici.
ONE DAY (2022)
Video installation presented at Vogelklang Soundcamp 2022, Schwarzwald, Germany
Continuous 24-hour recording in the town of Sankt Georgen im Schwarzwald, Germany. transformed into a 24 minute video with spectrogram (1 minute = 1 hour). Recording and video by Diane Barbé, 2022. Many thanks to Global Forest e.V. for the support and residency.
This is part of an ongoing research project dedicated to environmental acoustics and durational “tonalities” of places.
>> Find out more on the archives of the Kunstverein Global Forest e.V.
VA – POSSIBLE MOISTURES
on forms of minutiae (fom03, 2021)
For its third release, forms of minutiae presents ‘possible moistures’ a non-profit compilation of field recordings and soundscape compositions derived from various aqueous environments and their autochthons.
This gathering is made of 16 sonic encounters collected by field recordists and sound artists across the world. Artists were invited to submit sounds from marine and aquatic-related events, phenomena, geologies, fauna, flora, geographies, and technologies. From the thawing acoustics of Icelandic and Antarctic glaciers to the non-human voices of Australian wetlands, while meeting sea and river dwellers, the listeners embark on a sonic journey across the globe’s possible moistures.