HJ ANDREWS EXPERIMENTAL FOREST

I am have been a musician-in-residence at HJ Andrews Experimental Forest in Oregon since May 2018. HJ Andrews researchers have published much of the foundational research concerning old growth forests and their work has revealed magical worlds of ecological relationships and nutrient cycling, as well as affected environmental policy and greatly impacted conservation on public and private lands. HJ Andrews researchers have long developed and supported an interdisciplinary approach that has revealed important and fascinating details over the long-term. HJA is part of the international network of Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) stations, and much research is planned out to look at changes over as long as 200 years. This reveals a much more accurate picture of the true mechanics of pacific northwest forests. As a musician in their Long Term Ecological Reflections program, I have visited research sites and accompanied scientists in the field so that I could contribute my own interpretation and documentation of this place. Thank you to Spring Creek, to the biologists who have invited me into the field, and to Fred Swanson, Mark Schulze, Brenda Hamlow, and Kathleen Turnley for welcoming me at HJA.

Lookout Creek: Eighth Notes

currently on exhibit at Audiosfera at Museo Nacional Reina Sofia (Madrid, SP)

Lookout Creek: Eighth Notes is sound piece is modeled after HJA resident Leah Wilson's work, Ambient (2014), which hangs on the wall outside the apartment I stayed in at HJA. Andrews researcher Fred Swanson suggested that I create an audio piece based on her approach. Leah had examined and represented the reflections of light and color in and around a small stone placed in the stream. I became excited about this idea of looking at one physical space and taking readings/documentation of the myriad of sonic textures, pitches and combinations that can occur in that one point - and thus making a tangible representation of what might ordinarily seem like a indecipherable stream of noise. Through this work I have thought about the immense musicality of stream acoustics, how we might grow more familiar with each stream site's acoustic details through isolation and repetition. I re-visited Leah's approximate sampling site on Lookout Creek, at the water gage. I placed a Hydrophone in one spot on a flat rock at the stream bottom, and took one 10 second recording every two minutes. From each 10 second sample, I extracted 4 recordings of eighth-note or dotted eighth note value at set points across samples, and systematically built these notes into bars which I then looped. The composition begins with the 1st sample's loop, and moves through each subsequent loop, with sections of overlap between each consecutive pair. I did not effect or process the sounds beyond using an equalizer and adding a touch of reverb. Anthony Brisson did the final mastering of this work. 

Old Growth Playback (Ecosystem Sound Restoration)
[in progress]

Old Growth Playback is a sound work and symbolic gesture honoring the process of ecological succession and soundscape recovery in disturbed forest habitats. It is inspired by recently published research where sounds of a healthy coral reef were projected in a degraded reef ecosystem and aided restoration efforts by attracting species that normally are limited to healthy reefs. For Old Growth Playback I collected field recordings in old growth forest that is habitat for the endangered Spotted Owl (Strix occidentalis). The species assemblage, forest structure and resulting spatialization of sound in this type of forest are unique and increasingly rare as deforestation continues. I wrote a soundscape composition from these recordings and played it back through a multi-speaker system in each of four different disturbed forest habitats nearby the old growth. These habitats included a homogenous plantation of Doug Fir trees, a clear-cut, a recovering burned forest, and a selectively thinned forest. The sounds were re-recorded from multiple points in the landscape, and the resulting recordings included species reacting in real time to the projected sounds.

Raw Footage from Site 4, Selectively Logged Forest, for Old Growth Playback:

photos by lisa schonberg & leah wilson