Like wine spreading across a tablecloth, the sound and light of European civilisation slowly eked its way into the ‘silent’ Australian interior. The stains that remain, however, are blood red, for this preternatural ‘silence’ is partly a euphemism: “it is easier by far to place, not Aborigines, but silence on the far side of the frontier.”[3] But the experience of silence was also partly the ignorance of the pioneer. With eyes and ears attuned only to the familiar, they were shocked by new sights and sounds.[4] This was a failure of sensory and intellectual assimilation—and a failure which sought to overcome its alienation through violence against both man and nature.

If this history—and genocide—begins with the dull thud of an axe[5], how are we to capture Australia’s echoes and understand their resonances?

An attuned ear could have listened[6] to the sounds the land emitted. But ‘sound,’ the perceived positive to silence’s negative, is so often understood only to be the human and the ‘beautiful’. By the twentieth century, however, an aesthetic appreciation and artistic apprehension of the diverse sounds in the world becomes an interest entertained by hundreds of practitioners around the world. Composers of soundscape art draw on everyday sounds and other ‘latent’ sound environments to create their works.[7]

The field of soundscape art is a fertile one in Australia. It yields manifold styles and approaches; manifold engagements with local landscapes as well as transnational spaces. These soundscapes offer the sounds of cities, towns and badlands; of empty drums, afternoon barbecues and cicadas in the sun. Their provenance is outside language—or, perhaps, better put, it is the global language of sounds, of the world’s rhythms and tones stressed and emphasised.

As sounds taken from the world, processed and sent back out as artistic works, these recordings bear always the load of being an ‘interpretation’; they are framed and edited, at once contingent and controlled. They are a kind of aural entropy—a play of sounds in a system closed off by microphones, computers and artistic endeavour. Claims to realism do not always acknowledge this. Such determinedly realist works erase the human, artistic act while at the same time positing the resultant artistic artefact as worthy of attention (a kind of immodest modesty then: ‘I bring you an artistic work and I wash my hands of it—but do you like it?’). Yet others put their action inside the aural frame (footsteps, the ruffle of a coat), admitting a kind of Heisenberg uncertainty principle for the arts; or, indeed, a thoroughly modernist underlining of artistic production.

Lawrence English and Alan Lamb, the central artists discussed here, are respected figures in the Australian sound art scene. Their works lead us to some of the different ways landscape and soundscape are imagined in Australia. English’s works cross the tangled lines of flight in experimental music: he runs a respected record label issuing local and international releases, curates at the Brisbane Powerhouse and Judith Wright Centre of Contemporary Arts, collaborates with artists from around the world on one-off projects—and composes intricate, distilled field recordings in Australian and international settings. Alan Lamb, a Scottish ex-pat, is much less prolific and more singular in his focus. He builds large instruments which stage an interface between culture and nature. His so-called “Faraway Wind Organ”, for instance, was a sonic reservoir, tapped into whenever inspiration struck—and then left to hum its own unpredictable and melancholy tune. Other projects by Lamb have used the landscape as a kind of base for sonic experiments between wind and wire, water and sun, wind and rock (as seen in the Wogarno project).

It could be said that Lamb is to poetry as English is to prose: Lamb is an impressionistic artist, concerned with a compressed but sonorous exposition of both colonialism’s desolate remnants in the Australian outback and the very landscapes which made those colonists turn and run; English is interested too in the remnants of a society, but, in the work I consider here (Ghost Towns [Room 40, 2004]), his concern is with the ravages of the post-industrial economy on Australia’s ‘Ghost Towns’. As such, his is at once a work infused with socio-political specificity and a generalised sense of the (global) ‘field recording’ aesthetic. If Lamb and English point to the richness of interpretations of space in Australian sound, it is for this reason that their differences are stressed here.

Using these two artists as examples, the work here takes as its starting point an observation by Ros Bandt:

Focusing on auditory phenomena through the processes of listening and hearing requires us to inhabit time, to be in the temporal continuum of place. By participating in the auditory moment, the continuously changing present can be more fully known through experience. The present becomes the past in a moment and activates memory thereby penetrating many layers of consciousness. What are we hearing, what did we hear? To stop still, to take time to listen is an uncommon practice in modern civilised white society. Listening requires a sharing of temporal space; it is a communal experience very much defined by the sense of place. Every site is an acoustic space, a place to listen. Acoustic space is where time and space merge as they are articulated by sound.[8]

Across the pages of this site I hope to elucidate this connection between site, sound and memory by looking to the ways that those aural experiences are framed in works of sound art. There is a suggestive narrative of exploration—as indicated by the order of menu items above (thus beginning with the history of soundscape as an art)—but this journey is open to redefinition. In line with the potential of a browser-driven narrative, important concepts are referenced and linked to other sections when they are fundamental to the discussion.