Feeling for Sound- Further Research

Cathy Lane-

Cathy Lane is a composer, sound artist, lecturer and researcher. Her work and research has taken an interest in the past, and individual memories through sound, which in turn led to an exploration of gender, spoken word, anthropology in sound design. Her work consists of field recordings, site specific installations, concert pieces, installed compositions etc.

On her soundcloud page 'playing with words': https://soundcloud.com/playingwithwords there are extracts of many of her works. The first one I was interested in looking at was 'Nesting Stones' as when initially researching about Cathy Lane, that piece came up a lot and The Wire listed it under their '100 Records That Set the World On Fire While No One Was Listening' list.

This is from the description of the piece on Sound Cloud:

Anybody who has ever had an intense relationship with another person will know that for every positive emotion experienced there is a corresponding negative feeling. Nesting Stones is based on my feelings about my relationship with my baby daughter.
In this composition I am using and developing anecdotal structures and gestural metaphors harnessing the sense of spatial positioning and movement and the tension between the recognisable and stated and the barely recognisable and unrecognisable to explore and express the contradictions and dualities of that relationship.
The sound material for the piece is all drawn from recordings of myself and my daughter.

This piece, for me, is successful in the sense that it shows the peaks and troughs in a relationship, with moments of longer, more hypnotic sounds and moments of loud, quick chaos. However, like a relationship, it is never silent. There is always movement, it is persistent. It reminds me of what people must experience when becoming a new parent. The uncertainty, anxiety, and chaotic nature of the relationship as you get no break from this child who constantly needs your attention.

In terms of the actual sound design technique, I really love the electro acoustic feel to this. With the combination of field recordings and the heavy manipulation, Lane has given the child's voice less of an organic, living quality and more of a relentless, parasitic one. However, for my own sound design, I think this would lack some kind of consistency, however I really love the electro acoustic thing she has done and I would love to incorporate some elements of this in my own project.




Hidden Lives was another popular piece I discovered, its popularity unsurprising to me as it tackles gender roles for women in the past. What this piece was trying to create was a sense of memory associated with a space where women were subjected to a life of backbreaking house upkeep, including the upkeep of their own appearance as well. This is discussed in the description given of this piece:

All the material for this piece is drawn from a selection of women reading from “The Book of Hints and Wrinkles” a small piece of social history from the 1930s which describes how women should manage both their houses and themselves in no uncertain terms. The daily routine timetable is enough to ensure that no woman could ever spend much time outside the house or away from this backbreaking schedule, and advice on personal appearance is delivered in such a way as to suggest that women are in fact part of the furnishing of the house to be polished, scrubbed and generally to look clean, welcoming and attractive.

Where this piece succeeds for me mostly is the spoken word elements of the piece, with only words or sounds being heard in an echoed fashion. The layering of these voices also provides a sense of the period of time this was happening in, and the sheer volume of people that were being subjected to this kind of life. Also the constant noise underneath this piece, especially in the beginning gives a sense of the constant work that women in the 1930's were undertaking, and that was expected of them.



The last project I was interested in looking into was The Memory Machine, which relates very directly to my own project. The memory machine was a site specific interactive sound installation which was trying to trigger individual memories for people.

The Memory Machine was an interactive installation which was developed in collaboration with Nye Parry. It had two different manifestations in 2002 and 2003 in each case it played out a changing composition of sonic material specifically chosen to trigger individual memories in the listener. These memories were then recorded into The Memory Machine and became part of the ongoing musical mix that in turn both triggered more memories and were recorded as an memory archive. The changing composition comprised different memories being released into the mix and as they repeated at various intervals different processes were applied to them so that as time went on they became fragmented semantically indistinct and the musicality of the speech became increasingly emphasised in an attempt to mirror some of the workings of individual memory.
It was first shown at Cybersonica in 2002. In this version the aim was to trigger memories in different categories. The sounds that were used to do this related to major historical and cultural events of the previous 60 years such as television theme tunes, pop tunes, radio news broadcasts etc

The end result shown on Sound Cloud is the memories that were produced and recorded by participants of the sound installation. what I find interesting about this is the memories alone have gone into creating new elements of the piece, as words and similar experiences by other people, voices that feel familiar can trigger memories in their own way. Along with popular, well loved sounds such as music, theme tunes, stories, that provide a nostalgic feeling most of the time, the voices provide a far more present and real memory. A word or sound of someone else recalling a memory may make you remember something that happened 1 hour ago or 10 years ago.


In terms of my own sound project, it may be useful for me to consider using some things which are familiar to me, and others, that represent the time period that my sound piece is trying to convey, or the type of situation or feeling that want to make the audience feel.