Month: May 2023

She stated as the classical training in vocal and cello, and she is the vocalist who is doing experimental improvisational performance. During the lecture, she talked a lot about her story: how she become sound artist, how her personal story shape her practice now. The identity as an individual and her life-experience drive her to create her own sonic language. She said most of her work didn’t have the specific intention which she just expressing herself by improvise and also listen to other player. Her lecture reminded me that sometime we don’t have to have a clear intention to achieve something or showing something huge. We can just be ourselves.

This also can be applied in improvisation. During the workshop, she said the best state of mind while improvising is to get lost. Be present. It is a bit like mediation. Let the body and instinct dive you around. Sonically, I am not the big fans of her works, but the idea of how to improvise really inspire me and remind me of how to create my own arts work. Everyone have their story and history, and those shape who we are and it all shows in our creation, so embrace them.

I am so excited for her lecture because recently I’m reading the book In The Field by her and Angus Carlyle. I’m interested in field recording which Cathy is one of the expert in this area. I’m also curios about her approach to field recording because her book didn’t talk much about themself.

One of her work call:The Hebrides Suite: mapping the islands in sound at Museum nan Eilean, Isle of Benbecula, Outer Hebrides, Scotland. This project investigate human activity in the past and present in the certain places which is the island in Scotland. Can we trace the history sonically and how the past affect the present sonic environment. She went to field recoding in the Island as well as doing workshop with the students in Caitriona and Lisa from Museum nan Eilean, and asking them to interview their parents or grand parents about the story of places.

The most interesting point that Cathy said during the lecture was the function of field recording. She said field recording have the function of documentary which for me, I haven’t think about it as documentary. For me, field recording is gathering sounds from the outside and that contrasting the conventional way to create composition. I am not sitting in the room to create sounds by using instruments. I am gathering the excessing sounds and manipulating those sounds. This way, I think it is more organic and the idea of the ‘normal’ everyday sounds can be interesting which depends how to listen them.