New Zealand ‘trasmission’ artist, Sally Ann McIntyre, has just arrived in the UK for the symposium, together with a suitcase of lost and extinct sounds. Sally will be talking about the missing voice of the ground-dwelling owl: the Huia. She writes: Lost to human hearing all that is left is is a series of thinly transcribed folk notations of their warning calls by bushmen, and one recording of a human voice demonstrating the sonic lure which would call these birds from the forest. This vocalisation is not the sound of the bird, and neither is it the sound of a human imitation of the bird, it’s the sound of a human interacting with a bird. Interacting with a bird that no longer exists. Dugal McKinnon writes “It can be said that recording reveals, but an inescapable aspect of this revealing is to expose the limits of recording technology: the recording (or phonograph), like the photograph, points as much to what it cannot do as to what it can do. In listening, if we start to see these illegible landscapes, it is only with the clarity that an imperfect copy provides. And the glimpse is just for a moment, before the noise drowns it out.’
Full details of the symposium programme available here: timesenselandscape.com/programme/
chalk: time, sense and landscape 