Sound art work ‘The Billion’, presented as part of ‘Audiosphere: Sound Experimentation 1980-2020’ at the Museo Nacional Centre de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, Spain. Exhibition dates: Oct 14 2020-Jan 11 2021. Curator: Francisco Lopez

This work is a response to the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019-20. It explores the presence of humans within a Gaian system, and our tendency to disconnect from higher order systems and processes that operate within it. I have drawn on Timothy Morton’s (2013) concept of the ‘hyperobject’, being phenomena of such vast temporal and spatial dimensions that they defeat traditional ideas about what a ‘thing’ is in the first place. Climate change is seen as a hyperobject in this frame, as might the destruction of one billion animals that were reported as a result of the fires. The work’s title ‘The Billion’ directly refers to this event.

Hyperobjects are here, right here in my social and experiential space. Like faces pressed against a window, they leer at me menacingly: their very nearness is what menaces (Morton, 2013)

The sound materials for the work are a series of environmental field recordings I made in bushland areas along the south east coast of Australia prior to the bushfire events. These high resolution digital recordings capture insect and bird life as well as water flows and distant wind movement. In the composition process, these materials are subjected to a range of digital alteration processes that move them progressively toward abstraction through extreme time stretching, pitch domain and spectral filtering manipulations. In their altered states they enter a dialogue with subtle electronic elements to form a composite sonic fabric of natural and electronic materials where, at times, it becomes difficult to distinguish natural from man-made elements. Insects move into ringing pitched textures, crows and magpies appear to cry as they slow down, processed extreme time stretched human vocalisations enter the texture in dialogue with the birdlife and insects and low filtered wind takes on the properties of the impeding roar of an intense fire front.

Throughout the work, technological ‘faults’ such as digital audio clocking errors, distressed digital tape dropouts and vinyl surface noise are used as sonic elements. These elements reference failed or broken technologies and take on a metaphorical quality where humans enter the sonic landscape of the work via these faulty technologies. Over the course of the work, the composition moves from a naturalistic, representational soundscape towards a highly distressed, dystopian one, serving as a metaphor for the passing of the fire front. Through audio processing, apparently crying animals forces us to confront the idea of animals as sentient beings and question human exceptionalism. These sonic metaphors speak to the unstable and uneasy relationship we have with our surroundings.