With a PhD from Brown, museum exhibitions, and field recordings made for the Nat Geo Network, Brian House is a sound artist legend. His studies in the rhythms of human systems have led him into “entanglements with the nonhuman world,” via self-devised technologies.
“I’m trying to communicate sounds that are all around us, but which we cannot ordinarily hear — sounds equally geophysical, anthropogenic, and, on some level, disturbing in the sense that they may shift our worldview.”
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Inspired by Roger Payne’s Songs of the Humpback Whale recordings which transformed how we view animals and conservation, Brian is going for something similarly appropriate to climate change with his new album, Everyday Infrasound in an Uncertain World, and an accompanying art installation.
“It’s more or less a straight 24-hour recording sped up by a factor of 60,” which becomes 24 minutes, 12 minutes each side, with its pitch raised 6 octaves in order to hear super low sounds. “My project is about atmospheric infrasound, low-frequency sounds traveling through the air, such as storms, gas flares, meteors, wind over the ocean, glaciers cracking, wildfires, etc.”
In order to do this accurately, House developed “macrophones,” rather than microphones, to go beyond the norms of the “field recording” genre for something more deafeningly epic.
“Macrophones are my design, but they’re based on infrasound arrays used by the [Comprehensive] Nuclear Test Ban Treaty Organization to monitor for nuclear testing,” he notes. “Microphones let us hear small sounds. Macrophones enable us to hear big ones… When I listened to the results, hearing all this crazy shit, I’m realizing that what I’m hearing are the sounds of climate change.
“I’m not sure about calling it ‘music’ as it’s not a composition or something. It’s sound that is always here. It’s unlike anything else I’ve ever heard — atmospheric infrasound, nothing else.
“What it does is act as a kind of witness to what is happening with our planet. If you could hear these wild booms, whistles and crackles as you are walking down the street, you would intuitively understand the scale of the planet in a different way. It is not a passive planet, things are happening, big things. I don’t understand them, and that’s part of the point – in our human hubris, we think we have it all figured out, or at least that it’s all up to us, but in actuality there are agencies larger than our own at work. And either we figure out a humbler role to play within all that, or we’re gone.”
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