Michael Gallagher

Where to start? Perhaps with my sense that the sheer accumulation of dramatic events, both in the UK and far beyond, demands some kind of response from an academic in my position. And a growing concern that my research interests in sound and audio media might be, to put it bluntly, irrelevant to the pressing matters at hand: a nuclear disaster in Japan; uprisings, unrest and civil war erupting across North Africa and the Middle East; drastic cuts to UK public services; riots and looting in England; crisis and debt in the Eurozone; the phone hacking scandal; the list goes on.

I find myself living in a nation governed by a privileged elite who insist that ‘we are all in this together’, when it is plainly obvious that they have sufficient personal wealth and connections to shield them from any significant downturn in their own economic fortunes. Under their rule, the UK has become a place where a girl who stole a mismatched pair of trainers from a smashed up shop has been given a 10 month jail sentence, yet no grounds can be found to prosecute (b/w)ankers like ‘Sir’ Fred Goodwin, whose reckless mismanagement of the Royal Bank of Scotland led to a bail out in which an incomprehenible £25 billion of government money has been lost. Goodwin has walked away with a £16 million pension, and our legal system is apparently unable (i.e. unwilling) to do anything to prevent this. That money would buy nearly 140,000 pairs of Nike Air Max trainers. Matching pairs.

And yet much of my time in the last six months has been spent adjusting to a new job in Glasgow, writing funding applications for research on sonic geographies, making audio recordings, taking photos and making minimal techno music. On recent excursions, I’ve found myself recording the sounds of a modernist ruin, the howling of the wind in fences around my local sewage works, and the fizzle of metal-studded winter tyres on cars in Finland.

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Is this pure escapism, a kind of apolitical aestheticism? I have a weblog, and I have strong opinions about the unfolding economic and political mess – surely I should be speaking (or writing) up?

Looking around, however, there is no shortage of half-baked, narrowly informed, pre-fabricated analysis being rolled out on all sides of every debate. The danger of saying something stupid and unconstructive seems particularly high. As does the danger of speaking about things of which one has very limited experience or knowledge. For example, why did the BBC decide that David Starkey, a celebrity historian and TV presenter, should have anything worthwhile to say about rioting and youth culture? Or that Jeremy Clarkson – a man who has made a successful career in the media by performing an exaggerated caricature of insensitive, chauvenistic, materialistic masculinity – would be worth quizzing about public sector strikes?

I have a background in social research with children and young people, including on issues of participation and inclusion, and I’ve also spent some time as a youth worker. Yet when it came to the riots in England I genuinely didn’t know what to make of them. The immediate responses on both the right and left seemed inadequate. David Harvey’s commentary, for example, was pretty much exactly what you would expect him to say based on his previous work. Blame global capitalism. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but it’s such a familiar diagnosis that I’m left wondering whether it really adds any insight.

What seems more useful at this point are propositions for action, and in this respect a recent public speech by Harvey seems more constructive, particularly towards the end:

Meanwhile, most mainstream politicians and commentators are offering solutions that seem incredibly negative. The rhetoric is all of necessity, difficulty, tough decisions, limitation, reduction, deficit, essential measures. A miserable, miserly discourse that makes me feel shrouded in permanent drizzle, even when the sun is shining outside. What about joy, hope, fun, play, freedom, life, love? Surely these are things we need most of all right now.

So, here is my end-of-2011, ramshackle, recycled, rehashed, cobbled together, incoherent, poorly-thought-out five point plan for growth – some things that I, you, we could do that might have at least a small chance of making a positive difference.

1. Pay less attention to the mainstream media and party politicians. Both have become largely theatrical, about performance, maufacturing spectacle, entertaining an audience, and the production of celebrity personalities. I don’t know about you, but for me much of the information I’m receiving about the various unfolding crises is being mediated by this process. It’s easy to slip into taking it seriously. Incessant hyperbole and graphic images can seep into the unconscious. Turning off (the radio, the TV, the internet) becomes a survival strategy. If in doubt, do it! We’re also lucky in that the internet has massively diversified the forms of mediatisation available to us. After the riots, I found the London Sound Survey’s recording of looting – which, to my ears, sounds a bit like a rowdy street party – to be an interesting contrast to the looping helicopter footage of burning buildings on the TV news channels.

2. Believe that Babylon shall fall. I’m talking about Babylon in the Rastafari sense of institutional oppression, the various forms of government and policing, and the bureaucracy, lies and corruption they engender. It’s very difficult at the moment to resist thinking in terms of ‘us and them’, and a revolution that will happen at some particular point in history. Babylon fits with that, but I have a different interpretation, of Babylon as a system that we’re all enmeshed in, all reproducing, but that is also continuously falling. ‘Shall fall’ then becomes less a prophecy of some future event, and more a recognition of the inevitable failure that is endemic to processes of control and domination. Check out my current favourite downfall of Babylon anthem, an absolutely deadly Rhythm and Sound track from 2003. It’s the perfect mantra for our times:

3. If you live in England, consider moving to Scotland. The Scottish Government is as problematic as any parliamentary system, but the level of bullshit appears to be several orders of magnitude lower up here. Alex Salmond is certainly a celebrity of sorts, but to nowhere near the extent of Cameron, Clegg et al. We have some sensible things like proportional representation, free prescriptions, ambitious green energy targets, and the government will pay your fees for higher education if you’ve been living here for 3 years or more. It’s by no means perfect but right now it feels way better than what is going on down south. The weather can be hard work, but things like mountains, beaches, islands, wildlife, fewer traffic jams, plentiful clean water and stunning whisky more than make up for that.

4. Do as many fun things that involve no exchange of money as possible. Yes, this is flippant, yes it’s frivolous, and yes it’s the sort of trite bollocks you’d find in a self-help book, but: every time you have fun without exchanging money, you are actively chipping away, albeit in a tiny way, at the whole crisis-deficit-fear mentality, reminding yourself that your personal happiness does not depend solely on money, and flicking two fingers at western societies’ ludicrous, obsessive, crippling subservience to financial markets. The more of that the better in my view.

5. Finally, let’s resist, in all possible ways, big and small, the appalling marketisation and consumerisation of UK higher education. If you’re based in the UK, consider signing this petition in defence of public education. It’s going to Westminster so it probably won’t make a blind bit of difference, but it might help raise the profile of the issue a bit. The full text of the White Paper being opposed by the petition is here. Thinking a bit more widely, the Globalise Resistance website seems helpful. And there are obviously all kinds of more direct actions that academics can take, and in many cases are taking: informal peer support, giving free talks and public presentations, freely distributing electronic copies of publications. So here’s an offer: if anyone wants any of these things from me, get in touch.

Happy Christmas, and all the best for 2012.

Jonathan Prior and I have produced a five minute audio piece documenting the workshop led by Chris Watson earlier this year. It’s a mixture of recordings we made on our trip out to the seaside at North Berwick and a few clips from an interview we did with him at the start of the week:

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This is a little late notice, but I’ll be presenting at an event at CRiSAP (Creative Research into Sound Arts Practice) in London tomorrow. Info as follows:

the uses and abuses of field recording

June 9th, 2011, 3pm to 6pm
Podium Lecture Theatre
London College of Communication
SE1 6SB

On the 9 June this year CRiSAP is holding its fifth research symposium. In celebration of the beginning of our two year EU Cultural Partnership Project, the event will explore the role of field recording in artistic practice. We have invited eight speakers who all, in different ways and for different reasons, use microphones to capture something of the world around them: Viv Corringham, Peter Cusack, Felicity Ford, Michael Gallagher, Ruth Hawkins, Bill Thompson, Salomé Voegelin and Mark Peter Wright.

For this symposium we wanted to try something a little different and adapt the PechaKucha format where, while presenters are talking, their chosen 20 slides are each projected for 20 seconds. According to its originators this “makes presentations concise, and keep things moving at a rapid pace”. We want to spice the pot a little by asking the presenters to conclude with 2 minutes of recorded sound.

This exciting event will conclude with tea and cakes and a concert featuring Viv Corringham (voice); Peter Cusack (guitar, saz, samples & electronics)

Viv Corringham and Peter Cusack perform songs, mixed with improvisation, and soundscapes created from environmental recordings – all controlled live. Songs are from the Eastern Mediterranean area, including Greek rembetika and Turkish folk, others are self written. They will be joined by flute, shakuhachi and ney player Jan Hendrickse.

“Interesting, challenging stuff…” Folk Roots

“ingeniously crafted settings… make for fascinating listening… unorthodox yet entirely persuasive arrangements” Julian Cowley, The Wire

All are very welcome and admission is free.

During Chris Watson’s recent visit, he took a group of sound design students out to make recordings of the dawn chorus. Inspired by this, Jonathan Prior and I decided to do our own early morning excursion a few days ago, on May 11th. The dawn chorus is at its peak around this time of year. We chose to record in Holyrood Park between the Salisbury crags and Arthur’s Seat. Chris said that the best time is from half an hour before sunrise to half an hour after, so we set things rolling just before 4:30am and let the recording run for an hour, right across the daybreak.

Each of us used a Rode NT4 to make a stereo recording. As you can see in the photo, the mics were pointed in opposite directions and spaced apart, so we’ll be able to use the two stereo recordings to create a four channel piece at some point.

Here’s a 15 minute clip from my hour:

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Jonathan has uploaded his entire hour here.

The Google map below shows the location of the recording. This should make it clear why we chose it – plenty of habitats for birds, and the topography blocks out the noise of the city really well. It’s pretty amazing to live in a major world city that has this kind of environment right in the middle of it. Holyrood Park is owned by the Queen, which perhaps explains why it hasn’t been over-run by the developments of ‘luxury’ flats that seem to be taking over most of the city.

View Michael Gallagher's sound recording locations in a larger map

As time wore on during the recording, the birdsong was punctuated by a few other sounds: outbursts of croaking and flapping from what I think was a pheasant; a passing aeroplane; a cheeky honk from a train echoing off Arthur’s Seat; and a couple of noisy motor vehicles.

The biggest surprise of the morning came at the very end when we were packing up. It must have been about 5:45am, and a man came walking by, the first person we’d seen out there. He was quite well dressed, wearing a smart duffle coat. He said good morning, walked past, then came back and asked if we were professional film-makers. He said he was looking for someone to make a music video for a gospel group – could we do it, or did we know anyone who could? Part of me really wanted to say yes, just because of the unexpectedness of the offer. I didn’t though.

This sort of thing seems to happen quite often when I’m out doing field recordings. I think it’s the result of standing still for a while in a public place with some extremely conspicuous and strange-looking equipment. It seems to invite encounters.

One drawback of the location was the wind. It was a fairly still day by Edinburgh standards, but up in the park there was a stiff breeze. If you look at the map it’s easy to see how the wind gets funnelled from south to north directly into our chosen spot. Despite using a Rycote windshield (the big furry thing), I ended up with a bit of wind noise on my recording. Wind blowing on a mic creates low frequency rumble. I really hate it. To my ears, field recordings with wind noise on them sound really amateurish.

When we set up, it all sounded fine in the headphones. We then retreated maybe 200 meters away, to avoid the mics picking up any rustles or other noises from us. After a while, there were a few gusts that must have been too strong for the Rycote fur. I actually have an extra high wind cover – a sort of fleece jacket that goes under the furry stuff – so I’m going to start using that more often from now on.

In the clip above, I’ve reduced the wind noise by applying some low shelf EQ in my audio editing software using a plugin. I cut about 12dB at 240Hz, with the Q set to minimum for a gentle slope. Luckily, the birdsong is in a much higher frequency range, so cutting the low end like this hasn’t messed up the recording too much. If you listen carefully (e.g. at about 5:17) you’ll still hear a bit of wind rumble, but much less than on the original.

As I mentioned in my previous post, last week sound recordist Chris Watson came up to the University of Edinburgh for a visit which I’d organised. It was fantastic. An amazing man. As expected, I learned lots about field recording, but he also turned out to be a great storyteller, full of tales about his many travels, including recent visits to both poles, and stories of Factory Records, David Attenborough and so on.

As part of his visit, Jonathan Prior and I ran an audio recording training day for researchers and PhD students from the university. About ten of us travelled by train to the nearby seaside town of North Berwick, chosen to give us a range of environments to experiment in. Journalist Neil Cooper also joined us to write a piece for the Herald newspaper, which you can read here.

By the beach, with a thick haar (the local word for sea mist) rolling in, Chris showed us some of his equipment, including a parabolic reflector mic for very focussed work, such as isolating particular bird calls, and a pair of miniature omnidirectional mics he uses for more ambient recordings. As the name suggests, omnidirectional mics pick up sound from all around the mic capsule. Compared to cardiod mics – which pick up sound in front of the capsule – omnis are less sensitive to wind and handling noise and also tend to have a flatter, wider frequency response, particularly in the low end.

One technique Chris uses with the omnis is to attach them to a wire coat hanger. This gives a nice spacing for stereo, is super-lightweight, and very versatile: the hanger can be hung from vegetation or spiked into the ground.

Like all non-coincident stereo techniques, the coat hanger setup compromises mono compatibility, but if you can live with that the resulting recordings are superb. As I’ve said here before, my main mic for field recording is the Rode NT4 which has a fixed 90 degree XY pair of cardioid capsules. This could be seen as the opposite of the omnis, in that it is directional and coincident. I find the directionality useful, especially in urban environments where I often want to block out the traffic noise coming from behind me. However, compared with the omnis, the NT4 sounded quite ‘closed’, almost slightly stifled, whereas the omnis were incredibly open and natural sounding. Obviously this is all subjective, but I was taken aback by the difference. For ambient soundscape recording, the omnis were definitely better in my opinion. Plus there is the versatility of having two tiny, lightweight mics to position as you wish. The only advantages of the NT4 would be mono compatibility and directionality. Better get saving for some of those omnis…

I experimented with both the NT4 and the omnis recording the waves rolling in and the general ambience of the beach. Chris’s tip was to make several recordings from different perspectives and then layer these – he said in his experience this would give a more recognisable impression of the sea than just using one recording. Listening to the results I’m inclined to agree. The following mix was made from six different recordings, including some made very close to the breaking waves and others made further back up the beach:

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During a break for lunch, Chris spoke about his experiments attaching mics to animal carcasses to record birds feeding. The most well-known example of this is on the track Cracking Viscera from the album Outside the Circle of Fire. He produced that track by attaching mics to a zebra carcass, enabling him to record feeding vultures. However, it seems that Chris has used this technique on a number of occasions, starting one Christmas with a mic’ed up turkey carcass, pinned down in his garden using tent pegs, and starlings descending to peck at it, to the delight of his children. Deadpan, he explained that even though his daughter had left home by that point, their turkey was still big enough to fit four mics inside for a surround sound recording. Another story involved a roadkill rabbit and some ravens on the Isle of Mull. I quickly got the gear rolling to record this:

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A few notes of thanks, first to Chris for sharing his incredible expertise with us. For help with funding and organising his visit, thanks to: the Institute for Academic Development; Martin Parker and Jules Rawlinson from music; Dan Swanton and Jonathan Prior from geography; and my admin team in CRFR (all at the University of Edinburgh).

This week, I’m organising a visit to Edinburgh from sound recordist and Cabaret Voltaire founder member Chris Watson. Amongst other things, he’s giving a seminar in human geography and performing a concert at the end of the week. These are public events – details below. Jonathan Prior and I are also hoping to interview him and produce a journal paper reflecting on Chris’s ways of working, what they can tell us about sound recording and its possible place in geographical research.

For those who aren’t familiar with his work, Chris is a world renowned sound recordist who specialises in recording the wildlife sounds of animals, habitats and atmospheres. His work regularly appears on BBC television and radio. He works with people like David Attenborough and Bill Oddie, but also releases his work on experimental music label Touch. Last week he had a programme on Radio 4 entitled ‘Jules Verne’s Volcano’ which is still available on the iplayer:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0106tjp/Jules_Vernes_Volcano/

Seminar: ‘Capturing acoustic landscapes’.

Time: 4pm Thursday 21st April

Place: Old Library, Geography, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street EH9 8XP

Performance: as part of Dialogues festival, http://chriswatson.eventbrite.com/

Time: 8pm Friday 22nd April

Place: Inspace, 1 Crichton Street, Edinburgh, EH8 9AB

For those of you who haven’t yet seen this…

One of my recent projects has produced a ‘Creative Practice Primer’, a resource for researchers who wish to experiment with creative methods, particularly where digital media are involved. Based on a workshop at Dundee Contemporary Arts in November 2010, it contains documentation of several small projects, advice on techniques and technology and relfections on experimentation in research:

http://experimentalnetwork.org/creative-practice-primer-2/

There’s a lot of sound and audio stuff in there – covering contact mics, hydrophones, field recording techniques etc. Any feedback would be appreciated.

I’ve just had a paper published in Social and Cultural Geography based on my PhD research in a primary school. It’s all about how sound is used in the exercise of power in schools. It’s part of a special issue on spaces of education. If you have access to the journal, you can download it here.

I had another paper in Surveillance and Society last year that is a bit broader but also has some stuff about sonic surveillance. That journal is free to access, and you can get my paper here.

This is all pretty cool as these are my first academic publications touching on questions of sound. The research was just conventional ethnography – no audio recordings sadly. However, I did go on to make a short film called Seven Primary School Spaces in 2008 where the sound was a major focus. Check it out:

I’ll be showing this film at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference this year in a session on ‘Moving Geographies: Film and Video as Research Method’ which is being organised by Katherine Brickell, Bradley L. Garrett and Jessica Jacobs from Royal Holloway.

I’ve had an abstract accepted to a workshop on ‘Geography and the New Empirics’. My title is “Some unanswerably large but nonetheless pressing questions about ‘audio-visual’ methodologies.” At the moment I like deliberately pedantic titles. Here’s the abstract:

Empirics – audio-visual methods

And a link to the workshop website:

http://www.scgrg.org/geography-and-the-new-empirics/

It takes place at UCL and the RGS in London on 20th-21st January 2011. It’s being organised by Harriet Hawkins and some other geographers.

I’ll be using my presentation as an opportunity to open up some debate around questions like: what is the status of audio-visual media in research? How can audio-visual media function in a research context? How are audio-visual media, such as digital video and audio, different to written text – given that text is clearly visual and, arguably, also aural (since reading requires a voice of some kind)? These concerns have been nagging me more and more as I’ve been working with audio media over the last couple of years. I’m becoming convinced that, if people like me want to use audio-visual media and have this recognised as a legitimate way of ‘doing’ academic research, we’re going to need to address these kinds of questions much more thoroughly than has been the case thus far.

I’m particularly interested in thinking reflexively about the process of making and playing back audio and video recordings, in the same way that ethnographers have spent a lot of time thinking about what it is to produce texts for research purposes. It strikes me that there is nothing straightforward about this. When I take a mic and a recorder out into the city, record sounds, then edit the recordings, compress the files, upload them to a website or play them back in presentations…it’s all too easy to slip into believing that what I’m doing here is in some way ‘capturing’ sound so that the original experience can be ‘re-lived’ later.

I’m inclined instead to think about audio recording as a form of performance in which a whole host of elements are orchestrated together – sound vibrations, air, mics, headphones, ears, fingers, level controls, meters, eyes, silicon chips, electrons, and so on. The result is by no means a ‘captured’ sound – as though the sound had been caught like a bird and put in a cage, to be let out later. Instead what you walk away with is a trace left in some particles, be that magnetic or electrical or whatever, on tape, hard disk or flash memory. That trace can then be used later as a kind of script or score for another performance, again involving lots of different elements all working together – e.g. hard disk, computer, amplifier, speakers, air, ears. The behaviour of every element in the system affects these performances, and if one part misbehaves or breaks down the whole thing can fall apart, sometimes very beautifully.

The magical feat of technology is to hide this whole process inside a black box, and to accomplish the hiding ever more effectively. Think of the shift from wax cylinder to vinyl, tape, CD and now MP3s. At each stage the process becomes more invisible, and the technology arguably less prone to failures. This makes sense if you want to sell stuff to consumers. The illusion is part of the allure. Failures – vinyl crackles, chewed up tapes, CDs skipping digital glitches – expose the process, killing the magic. So they have to minimised as far as possible.

But in research, I want to be reflexive about what it is I’m doing – I see that as an important part of the process – so I want to open up the black box(es) and think more critically about exactly what is going on. Just as electronic and experimental musicians have come to value and even fetishise glitches, hisses, crackles and other hardware malfunctions (cf. Pole, Basic Channel, Position Normal, Oval, Matmos, Phillip Jeck, William Basinsky, Autechre, Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda etc etc) maybe researchers could use such failures as openings, chinks to be prised apart to expose the workings.

Back in September, Jonathan Prior and I co-organised a session of papers on Sonic Methods in Human Geography at the Royal Geographical Society annual conference (RGS-IBG). The presenters included a variety of sound artists, researchers and PhD students.

A few people suggested that we should record all the sessions – and we realised it would be a bit daft not to given the topic. I’ve now finished editing the recordings, and you can hear them and download them all from here:

http://www.archive.org/details/SonicMethodsInHumanGeography

Thanks to everyone who came along on the day, and especially to those who presented. Both Jonathan and I thought the range and quality of the presentations was outstanding, so I’m glad we managed to get an audible record of them. I also like how you can hear stuff like the projector fan, the room acoustics and the clinking of glasses.

We’re also planning a special issue of a journal based on the session. I’ll post more news on that here as it develops.