ENVIRONMENTAL SOUNDSCAPES IN FERRARI’S PRESQUE RIEN (1967–1970)

Portable field recorders enable composers to integrate natural spatial environments (both interior and exterior) into their work. Interior recordings bring us into living spaces, while recording the open space of the outdoors environment allows us to enter the realm of free field acoustics, characterized by a total lack of reflections. Of course, there can also be reflections outside, but the distance cue becomes especially important as we hear the natural foreground/background of the soundstage.

As mentioned in ­ chapter 4, Walter Ruttmann’s Weekend (1930) pioneered this genre, depicting the urban soundscape of Berlin. Two decades later, musique concrète used natural sounds, but typically in short clips spliced together rapidly. In contrast, Luc Ferrari’s breakthrough composition Presque rien ou le lever du jour au bord de la mer (1967–1970) began as a long, continuous recording of environmental sounds at a Yugoslavian beach. An inveterate recordist, Ferrari gathered sounds from around the world and integrated them into his compositions, creating amazing fictional soundscapes by layering one environment on top of another. By now, soundscape music is an established genre practiced by many artists (Schafer 1977).

(Composing Electronic Music - A NEW AESTHETIC by Curtis Roads)

The soundscape composition is a form of electroacoustic music, characterized by the presence of recognizable environmental sounds and contexts, the purpose being to invoke the listener's associations, memories, and imagination related to the soundscape. At first, the simple exercise of "framing" environmental sound by taking it out of context, where often it is ignored, and directing the listener's attention to it in a publication or public presentation, meant that the compositional technique involved was minimal . . . This neutral use of the material established one end of the continuum occupied by soundscape compositions, namely those that are the closest to the original environment, or what might be called "found compositions". Other works use transformations of environmental sounds . . . with an inevitable increase in the level of abstraction. However, the intent is always to reveal a deeper level of signifcation inherent within the sound and to invoke the listener's semantic associations without obliterating the sound's recognizability.
(Truax 1996b)