Qualcomm Institute SPAT Lab, April 6, 2023
“Ecospherical” is an ambisonic multichannel installation immersing listeners in natural and hybrid soundscapes of California and the Pacific Northwest. This project is based on extensive field recordings taken with a third-order ambisonic microphone array, documenting diverse ecosystems in the face of a rapidly changing climate. The spherical soundfields captured with this technology are decoded to the 20-channel speaker system of the Qualcomm Institute’s SPAT Lab to acoustically transport listeners to these remote locales teeming with life. In collaboration with UC San Diego performers, instrumental improvisations have been spatialized to become integral parts of these soundscapes, communicating in the natural cadences of their surroundings. Using custom, multichannel convolutions, environment and performance merge to envelop listeners in surreal, textural worlds. This project functions as both an experiment in the creative potential of spatial field recording and an effort in soundscape preservation, with a forthcoming soundscape archive making the raw field recordings available to artists and environmentalists. “Ecospherical” aims to bring awareness to the character and fragility of the ecosystems around us by exploring their unique musicality.
I met Charles during a course he was teaching, and during one of our breaks we got to discussing his background, work, and what brought him here. He told me about a field-recording project he was working on (Project Ecospherical) which piqued my interest, and luckily enough for me he said he didn’t have a pianist lined up yet. It seemed right down my alley, especially considering the unique role that Charles was looking for the instrumentalists to play, and I was eager to see what I could do with it. I’ll forever be grateful to Charles for being included throughout the course of his project as an undergraduate, and for always feeling heard and equal during the many discussions we had that would determine the scope of the piece.
After listening to his field recordings for the first time, I was absolutely transfixed by the soundscapes he captured in a way I wasn’t expecting, and had never quite felt to such extent. There was immediately so much character and fullness that came across in the recordings, which after settling into for a while, had qualities which became perceptible to me as compositional. I went through the recordings, admiring each one’s vastly unique feeling and scale, while also thinking of all the possibilities I could add on the piano. After several weeks of repeated listening, researching bird vocalizations, drafting notated melodic/rhythmic structures, and making note of distinct compositional qualities, we started to meet a couple of times a week to record early versions of ideas, and discuss the overall direction of the project as we went.
A few more months passed with meetings fitting into the work-week finely, and before we knew it a large part of the work which others could add to Charles’ project was out of the way, at least for now. He now had all of the pieces he needed to explore lots of different ideas and more, and he took his time building them into something coherent and true to himself. This took us all the way to the beginning of the next school year, where we came back to the studio to record final versions of our ideas and improvisations. At this point, I had organized my originally notated ideas and practiced how best to express them, which was often using extended techniques on the piano. There were some sections, however, which I had choreographed earlier to blend into the call-and-response activity of the birds in Charles’ recordings, and a good part of the studio recording session was spent listening to the recordings in real-time and improvising my mimicked structures in response.