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訪問以被訪者的採用的語言筆錄。
INTERVIEW 3 Nov 13, 2008
Yannick Dauby is a sound artist influenced by the natural sciences and social sciences. He spent several years in Taiwan recently to conduct field recordings of natural and cultural soundscapes. He talked to Edwin Lo, an emerging sound artist in Hong Kong, about his work.
YD: Yannick Dauby
EL: Edwin Lo
EL: Could you briefly introduce yourself?
YD: My Chinese name is Peng Ye-Sheng (澎葉生) and my favourite activity is going for a walk. When someone asks me what is my activity, I used to say “Sound art”. This includes a lot of practices including the collection and the manipulation of sounds, but the most important one, or at least the one that I breed the most, is the pleasure of outdoor listening. Listening to details, structures, evolution, behaviours, patterns, relationships, etc…
EL: Could you let us know how you start working with sound? Is there anything or anyone special that have influenced you into taking this path?
YD: I have a long-term fascination for extra-European musical traditions. That was probably the starting point: discovering music as if you arrive at an unknown place. And like many others the largest part of my listening experience of music came from recorded sounds. I was not introduced by someone specifically, but one element helped me so much for my orientation - public libraries. As far as I remember, I am used to the exploration of archives, of documents, as it is an incredible opportunity to travel through sound and music.
By chance I was in contact with experimental music (in fact an Eliane Radigue concert in a chapel…), and I immediately wanted to immerge myself into that, through studying electroacoustic composition and at the same time discovering large areas of less institution-related musical forms. Many artists gave me inspiration, but I would say that it is much more the cohabitation of different musical practices (from Uzbek music to industrial music to Ligeti) that made me think a bit about working with sound.
EL: When I visit your website, Kalerne, I discover that many of your works are often related to natural environment and natural phenomenon and you are still actively investigating this aspect. It seems that, for me, you are doing something like sound art as a multi-disciplinary approach which makes various connection or research with sound. What do you think about that?
YD: I am from a mid-sized city, a quite boring one from a cultural point of view, but I always have been deeply connected to the surrounding Alps and the Mediterranean Sea. I was not supposed to make music or sounds. I was more expecting spending my life studying lifeforms: oceanography, practice of geology at a very early age with my parents and more recently interest in ecology and ethology. For sure this interest for natural environment and animals is much more important than my studies. I find in there a lot of ideas and inspiration. I rarely open a book about music but I am always attracted by researches about animal behaviours, the most influential ones being the work of Estonian biosemiotics pionneer Jakob Von Uexküll and the French philosopher and ethologist Dominique Lestel. So, I would say that for me natural environment feed my artistic practice but at the same time field recordings and artistic activities are just a way to explore and learn about natural phenomena and environments.
Another attraction pole is the study of extra-European cultures. Ethnography and cultural anthropology are fascinating not only for the subject they deal with but also for the methods they use (participatory observation, description of daily life, immersion in a different social context). These help a lot when dealing with topics such as the listening of the environment.
About the multi-disciplinary approach, I would say that natural sciences such as ethology and social sciences such as ethnology provide complementary concepts and tools, all of them being based on in-site observation and interpretation through writing. I would say that for me working with sound, has to do with a certain kind of observation (= listening, recording, describing) and writing (= decision of what is relevant, creating relations, transmitting an experience). And reciprocally sound art can become a relevant tool for these scientific fields.
EL: You have been staying in Taiwan for some time. Can you let us know the background of this long trip? What is your sound experience in Taiwan? What are the things that impress you most? Is there any difference of sound with any place you had been before?
YD: Before coming to Taiwan, I never lived for a long time in another place than France. So, I still don’t know if my experiences in Taiwan are specific to this country, or if they are the consequence of my own move from a well-known place to a completely new one.
I came here in 2004 with my partner, visual artist Wan-Shuen Tsai. We were in residency at Taipei Artist Village. Immerged during one month in the city was quite a shock. The sounds of the urban environment are so loud here, the traffic is so invasive, that I just couldn’t or didn’t want to listen too much. Later, while living in Taipei neighborhood during one year, I noticed that my listening in the city was always limited, protective and passive. At the contrary, the vision was enhanced, leading me to practice more photography than phonography!
But each time I have been able to go out of the city, or even when finding quieter shelters such as garden or old houses, ears began to be highly active trying to catch all these unidentified sounds. With the exception of language (that I am still learning at a very beginner’s level) ,I would say that the most surprising phenomena is the way I progressively appropriate the different sounds (from the tree frogs to the metro through the typhoons), not only through identification but also because I associate so many emotions and physical sensations with them.
EL: Regarding your activities in Taiwan, like the sound art seminar, the art residency and Transonic 2008, how do you feel and how would you conclude these activities?
YD: For sure I don’t have a conclusion! I see it more like an on-going process of cultural immersion and development of my point of view. The artist-residency was an opportunity to be in contact with the local soundscape, and I’m still working on collecting sounds, sharing them and working with them. The sound art seminar evolved into lectures in various universities and school, and right now I am working in a Hakka community with kids from the countryside, discussing with them about musical traditions and soundscape. All these creative and pedagogic activities are for me a way to interact with and to learn about this country I am living in.
EL: The very first time I get to know you is through your website, Kalerne. Why do you establish Kalerne? Is there any story or meaning behind it?
YD: It came from regular and repetitive questions through mailing-list or individual emails: how do you make contact microphones, what is binaural microphone, and so on… So I decided to provide my own experiences about that, in the hope that someone would find them interesting, and that some others would share new ways of using them. Then when I restarted my studies, because of the lack of communication between students who were supposed to do theoretical research, I decided to write my thesis on-line, just to make it possible for anyone to criticize it, to comment on and discuss about it. Progressively it became for me a kind of permanent non-physical workshop. Some place where I can develop ideas, openly.
EL: The first official release of Kalerne, interestingly, is not from you, but Marc Namblard. What is the story behind this publication?
YD: Marc discovered the sounds of frozen lakes years ago, at the same time with another sound recordist Boris Jolivet. The first time Marc made me listening to these sounds I was stunned by the phenomenon itself but also by the quality of the recordings. During my last year in Taiwan, I began to make CD editions for special contexts such as creative markets, Marc told me that he would make something for me. Listening to the result, I didn’t think twice. I wanted to release it as a CD because such work really needs to be shared, and especially because this soundwork is a long duration listening experience, not a series of samples, not a rough field recording. It is a real proposition for the listener. This is how Kalerne Editions started.
EL: I read your essay about soundscape and sound art, honestly, your words really mean so much to me that somehow solved my deadlock in my mind. Sound art is not some kinds of technical operation of sound but more importantly is an experience for listeners. Is there any thing that makes you thinking in such way? Do your words reflect your observation of the current sound art scene (if it is exists)?
YD: Behind any technological tool, there is a kind of behaviour. The design, the possibilities and limitations are preparing for this behaviour. Press one button when you want and then you memorize sound. Therefore, I often encountered people hoping or criticizing the fact that in order to produce a sound artwork or at least to record an interesting sound, the technical operation is sufficient. But all of that is very weak consideration for the sensitivity of listeners.
In fact spending years behind microphones and loudspeakers doesn’t increase one’s technical efficiency. Such skills need so short a time to be learnt, it is so easy to buy and use audio equipment nowadays. But what change throughout the years of sound practice is the perception: the listening sharpens, becomes smoother or just adapts to the context. Sound art is about this evolution in one’s listening. Sound art practice makes the artist find a listening point of view, and it makes the audience share this listening point of view. Of course, I won’t say that my ears are better than 10 years ago! It is much more a special relationship to sounds that is permanently changing. I see it like a house whose shape is slowly changing through the weeks.
EL: Could you tell us what kind of equipment you are using right now?
YD: Since years, I haven’t change the kind of tools I use: no real studio, working at home only, with a pair of normal loudspeakers, with a normal software for editing and mixing. I have another piece of software for live interactions with sounds and building automatic systems. And I am always carrying various kind of microphones (from lo-tech home-built things to condensers ones), a good recorder and headphones (the same for the last 10 years!) in my back-pack.
EL: Any project or event you are working or planning right now?
YD: I am still trying to catch frogs! I hope to publish this month a CD devoted to Taiwan’s amphibians. I am collecting these sounds since several years, and hope to cover the whole species present in Taiwan. I already have half of the species, and it will take me years to listen and record the shyest and rarest one. I am trying to make this CD an aesthetic listening experience as well as some useful tool for naturalists.
By coincidence, I have also the opportunity to work in Hakka community, and I am collecting Bayin music around temples, and during weddings or funeral ceremonies. I still don’t know why I am documenting this practice. Maybe it is a way for me to be introduced to this musical form. Then I have also several collaboration projects I would like to develop as soon as I can meet again my remote friends.
~end~
coming soon…
John Lee, Ocean Chan, and Black talked to Yeung Yang about the concept behind Blackout Meditative Concert, and their personal initiation into voice works.
李耀誠 (框鼓、喉唱等) 、陳偉光 (尺八、喉唱) 、素黑 (銅謦、情感聲音、尺八) 談全黑靜心音樂會的理念，以及聽和唱的經驗。