spatial sound installation , experiential environmental intelligence , collective expression for change
DIVERS remix
This audio version is an excerpt from the spatialized electroacoustic sound composition of an interdisciplinary installation composed in collaboration with Learning Endings
for Neuberger Museum, SUNY Purchase Westchester NY
with Patty Chang for group show 'Hard Return' APR 26-30 2023
composer Anne Bourne
Learning Endings is Patty Chang, Aleksija Neimanis, Astrida Neimanis with guest Anne Bourne
In collaboration with veterinary pathologist Aleksija Neimanis, feminist cultural theorist Astrida Neimanis, and composer Anne Bourne, Chang presents a participatory, immersive environment. Grounded in a larger research project, Learning Endings, this multimedia performance contemplates caring for life and caring for death in the context of climate change through marine mammal necropsy.
Starting with a question, intention, or prompt around the project’s themes of communal mourning and reparative acts, a viewer is invited to play a memory game with images from a “touch archive”—a collection of images documenting a scientist’s touch during protocols of afterlife care in marine life autopsies. As the participant turns over cards and reenacts the gestures in the archive, the game is translated into a responsive real-time musical composition that forms a circuit between the individual and their larger environment.
Layered with a continual audio composition, the evolving sound piece accompanies a projected live-feed of the memory game played, occasionally disrupted by live-feeds of oceanic observation. The environment’s call-and-response sensibility encourages us to meditate on the inextricable links between the individual and collective, experience and memory, history and future.
Composers Notes:
Electroacoustic composition duration 40 minutes, will play continuously.
The Text Score for listening and improvising sound will be posted on the wall.
Live performers from the art students of SUNY Purchase
Voices tone throughout the day
Guest soloist Tim Warner, bass tombone
Sonic and choreographic choices respond to movement of the hands of the Touch Archive card turner
Live musicians synchronize with the hands of the card player by beginning or ending a long tone when they move to touch or lift a card.
All gestures of the participant, lifting or placing a card from the Touch Archive, as conductor.
Live musicians join the composition in free improvisation within the electroacoustic ambience
During the field recordings listen.
Soloists tone or improvise freely in extended technique or prepared instrument.
credits
DIVERS remix released September 7, 2024
electroacoustic composition credits:
composer/ producer Anne Bourne
Anne Bourne cello, voice, field recording
Michael White modular synthesizer
Brandon Valdivia percussion
Rob Clutton acoustic bass
Nicole Rampersaud trumpet
New Chance beat
field recording Svalbard, courtesy of Susan Schuppli
additional cello recorded by Matt Legge
water cellos recorded by seraphim
SHORELINE
After experiencing a flood in 2017, on the island in the Great Lake system where I lived with my daughter, I wanted to go out into the world to experience the truth of the climate crisis. I was inspired to travel to walk on ocean coasts, lake and river shores to witness what sea level rise meant in the world. To me shoreline was a metaphor for a constant changing negotiation between elements , evocative of climate peace. With the support of a Chalmers Foundation fellowship, I proposed ‘shoreline’ , to gather biosonic field recordings and oral histories, to consider the experience of changing water levels at this time, and to listen to voice practices near bodies of water, that had a resonance of mother tongue , harmonic overtones and naturally occurring tuning systems. On the shoreline, there is to be found an elemental play of difference, where water touches land. What I learned was to go below the surface . This lead me to understand the littoral where multi-species environment can be engaged with in the vibrant soundfield, which must be protected. And the unknowable deep ocean, where the commons hold our possible future. I am grateful to have made connection with TBA21 and Ocean Space in Venice, Triton and Territorial Agency, who are actively inspiring a many discipline conversation on oceana. Towards climate peace. It was not until I returned that I discovered that our flood was a controlled flood within the Great Lakes designed to accommodate ships having more capacity when they entered the trade route. The erosion caused threatened natural ecosystems and homes built too close to the water. After the deep reflection imposed by lockdown, and ongoing participation in the pedagogical experiment Ocean UNI offered by TBA21 and Ocean Space in collaboration with Territorial Agency, online due to the gallery closure in Venice, I began creating from the experience and the materials I captured in the field the preceding year. I realised that an essential quality to listening for me is to attend to the purpose of rebalancing human impact with the more than human in relationship within and interspecies soundfield. To express a harmonic balance within the environment I attend to the Oliveros perception that the environment is listening to my listening. I continue to compose with emergent sonics of piano and cello, while experimenting with the code of true sonic representation with what is real in field recordings. I hope amplification of bodies of water in my work influences the swift river of change we now find ourselves in. And that as John Palmesino says, we cannot go back , but through conversation and attention we can find a way to go through the next 30 years together before the first iceless summer.
In gratitude to OAC The Chalmers Foundation TBA21 Ocean Academy Territorial Agency M.o.M. Pauline Oliveros
gibraltar point beach erosion, 2017
shoreline LISTENING WALKS
Anne Bourne was mentored by renowned composer and listener Pauline Oliveros 1932-2016. Anne is an Certified Deep Listening facilitator and alumni from the Sangre De Cristo Mountain Deep Listening Retreats 1994-2009 where she trained in person with Oliveros. Anne is currently an affiliate with the Center for Deep Listening Rensselaer NY. and Trustee with M.o.M. who oversee the Pauline Oliveros Trust, NY. since 2017. Oliveros' publication 'Quantum Listening' was recently reissued by IGNOTA press London UK/ San Francisco, 2022. Anne recently attended the Geopoetics Symposium on Cortes Island which was a gathering of scholars, artists, poets , scientists, outdoor educators and composers to address shifting work to illuminate climate peace. Anne recently created Listen to Ice , the sonic imprints of glaciers, in collaboration with Artist field recording researcher Susan Schuppli, at the Toronto Biennial, 2022.
In Anne's Listening practice she leads guided listening walks as a gesture of attention towards the more than human species facing extinction in the ecosystems we share and love. Using the simpleText Scores of Oliveros, Anne facilitates community sounding (vocal toning) within the natural environment. Environmental Dialogue is a guided meditation and sounding experience for all non musicians and musicians alike. Anne will share the instructions composed by Oliveros that may open a deeper relationship to the ecosystem through listening and sounding, and the experience may bring a sense of well being.
feverish world 2018
Huron Waves 2022
SUNRISE SOUNDWALKS 7am JUNE 9,10,11,12
Join me this week for sunrise listening walks on the shores of Lake Huron and the 2G2 woodland trail at Blyth.
More information and maps here
June 9, 10, 11, 12 7am
"Can you imagine listening near Lake Huron at dawn, or with the many species in a woodland trail? Our four Sunrise Sound Walks, led by Canadian environmental artist and composer Anne Bourne, will explore the Lake’s wave patterns, the complex resonance of its deep waters, tectonic currents, the shifting shoreline sands, and the many pulses found in a forest floor. If this sounds exceptional, it is. Each intimate group of walkers shares a unique experience by listening to voices in nature, adding their own voices to a tone chorus in an environmental dialogue, all under the guidance of a world-famous musician and environmentalist."
Rain or Shine: Dress according to the weather. This walk will be along the lake shore.