Luciana Bass is a sound artist and guitarist currently based in Berlin, Germany, with whom I collaborate in different projects.

Luciana Bass ‘Improvised Guitar Pieces’ by Luciana Bass

catégorie4 Semaine de la création sonore et radiophonique is a week for artists from everywhere to show their work, from field recordings to improvised music, from talks to sound art listening sessions live from the station. I invite you to come, listen and engage with the ideas, which through sounds, are going to be shown here.

I will be taking part on this event by playing some of my pieces and by joining Vincent on his show ‘Memo’ for a discussion on how these sounds fit into the contemporary context of sound creation.  I encourage you to join us during the week and to keep listening to Radio Campus FM 94.0 Toulouse and through the World Wide Web, for upcoming events.

The first of a series of videos I am doing using a voice recorded telling a story in Occitan,  plus some sounds I recorded in location and FX.

The ideas was to create a short ethnographic – Sci- Fi piece based on my visits to that region.

Los Angeles Times reporter Borzou Daragahi reports from a rooftop in Tripoli, Libya, on Saturday as anti-aircraft fire is heard in the background. U.S. and allied forces have launched attacks on air defense targets around Libya in response to a U.N. resolution ordering the Libyan government to halt attacks on its civilians.

March 19, 2011, Borzou Daragahi, Los Angeles Times

By Eric Niiler

THE GIST

• Acoustic archaeology is an emerging field that melds acoustical analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting.
• Ancient people created fun house-like temples that featured scary sound effects.
• Some of the sites were likely built by people who took sensory-altering drugs.

Researchers are uncovering the secrets of ancient civilizations who built fun house-like temples that may have scared the pants off worshipers with scary sound effects, light shows and perhaps drug-induced psychedelic trips.

The emerging field of acoustic archaeology is a marriage of high-tech acoustic analysis and old-fashioned bone-hunting. The results of this scientific collaboration is a new understanding of cultures who used sound effects as entertainment, religion and a form of political control.

Miriam Kolar, a researcher at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research and Acoustics, has been studying the 3,000 year-old Chavin culture in the high plains of Peru. Kolar and her colleagues have been mapping a maze of underground tunnels, drains and hallways in which echoes don’t sound like echoes.

“The structures could be physically disorienting and the acoustic environment is very different than the natural world,” Kolar said. Ancient drawings from the Chavin culture show a people who were fascinated with sensory experiences — ancient hippies if you will.

“The iconography shows people mixed with animal features in altered states of being,” said Kolar, who is presenting her recent work at a conference in Cancun, Mexico this week. “There is peyote and mucus trails out of the nose indicative of people using psychoactive plant substances. They were taking drugs and having a hallucinogenic experience.”

If that wasn’t enough, the mazes at Chavin de Huantar also include air ducts that use sunlight to produce distorted shadows of the maze’s human participants. And sound waves from giant marine shells found in the maze in 2001 may have produced a frequency that actually rattled the eyeballs of those San Pedro cactus-using ancients, Kolar said.

“We consider sound to be important,” said Kolar. “We’ve gathered a lot of data and we’re finally starting to publish it.”

The Chavin de Huantar site in Peru isn’t the only place where sound played an important role. The Mayan rulers at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan also figured out how to use sound for crowd control. David Lubman, an acoustic engineer who has spent the past 12 years studying the Mayan site, says a strange bird-like echo from the Kukulkan temple was actually constructed on purpose.

“It’s sort of spooky,” Lubman said from Irvine, Calif. “It’s not an ordinary echo.”

Lubman’s analysis compared the acoustic soundprint of the quetzal bird, which was revered by Mayans, to the sound of the echo at Chichen Itza. The two sounds matched.

Lublin said the secret is in the acoustic properties of the steep staircase on the temple’s front.

Other new research presented at this week’s Acoustical Society of America conference in Cancun shows that Mayan rulers figured out how to build a public address system in the site’s giant ball court. That allowed kings to address hundreds of warriors and subjects without screaming.

In England, British researchers are using modern tools of acoustics to figure out what drumming noises may have sounded like to ancient visitors to Stonehenge.

Chavin stone art in the shape of a head, housed at the Museo De La Nacion in Lima, Peru. The 3,000 year-old Chavin culture produced tunnels and mazes with eerie sound effects.

I am currently in the south of France, in the Aveyron, an important department in Occitan history which is part of the the Midi Pyrennees Region }

Occitania is the region in southern Europe where Occitan was historically the main language spoken, and where it is sometimes still used, for the most part as a second language.

This cultural area roughly encompasses the southern half of France, as well as Monaco and smaller parts of Italy and Spain. Occitania has been recognized as a linguistic and cultural concept since the Middle Ages, but it has never been a legal nor a political entity under this name, although the territory was united in Roman times as the Septem Provinciae and the early Middle Ages before the French conquest started in the early 1200s.

I am currently in the region documenting the Occitan culture. I am making recordings in different villages, old factories, and obviously capturing voices and dialogues to get hold of a language that is very rare to hear around and which is apparently extinct. I contacted local people and with their help it’s getting much easier. It is motivating and certainly impressive to discover that this culture is actually alive although masked by a friendly French accent.

The first place I visited was the village of Concas (shell), an amazing little commune surrounded by mountains, this place is part of the ‘ Way of St. James’, surely an important stop to go on a pilgrimage. One of the main sonic characteristics that drew my attention are the echoing sounds that resonate all over the place, this gives a feeling of mysticism that a religious place must have.

Today I will continue to go around the region to get more hidden sounds of the Occitania. I will keep posting them here.

Field Studies is a programme of lectures and talks; recording work in the city; time spent at base editing recordings; and presenting and discussing our work. The workshop is led by three tutors who each run a studio with approximately nine students. On the first morning of the workshop, each tutor presents their ideas and ambitions and students elect a studio by ballot.

Each of the studios will follow their own timetable as far as recording, editing and group work is concerned, but we all meet at least once a day for lectures and presentations and will have time in the evening to socialize and discuss our work. The studio spaces are adjacent to each other and transparent, so there will be a lot of exchange and communication. There are lectures on Tuesday and Thursday morning, and an ‘Open mic’ session on Wednesday afternoon offering students an opportunity to present their own work (see below). On the last day of the workshop, we all come together in the afternoon to present and discuss what we have done.

Synopsis

AMERICAN GUN is set in a rural English seaside town.  Fire, a bullied teenage loner finds a dead American pilot washed up under the pier.  After discovering the pilot’s gun, the boy is robbed by two bullies, Gas and Sneak.  He pursues them out of town where they force him to kill a sheep.  Falling into a state of shock, he sees the dead pilot walk across the field and stand behind his aggressors.  As if in a dream, he turns the gun on them.

Director’s Vision

American Gun seeks to capture the wild isolation of the Dorset Coast line, from the deep blue English Channel across the blood red heathlands of Purbeck to the green farmer’s fields.  We want to create a vivid rural canvas for the microcosmic story of bullying and revenge.  Using the expansive open lands as counterpoints to the claustrophobic spaces of ancient industrialised buildings and machinery we will explore the internal and externalised characters of a lone boy and his tormentors.