And sometimes like a recording doesn't live up to your experience.
But this was- the recording was just astonishing.
I mean, it was incredibly powerful.
♪ ♪ ♪
Well for me, I've done many things.
I actually got an undergraduate degree in English.
I went and got a graduate degree in painting.
But halfway through that degree, I jumped ship and decided to pursue sound.
And part of it was my experience as a listener.
I always listened to experimental music,
and I think that really sort of trained my ears.
I also like making noise
and so I'm not a musician.
And so that idea of I think thinking of sound
and the textural properties of sound was really appealing to me.
And that sort of I turned that way and never went back
♪ ♪ ♪
For me,
I think I do a lot of different kinds of work.
Some of it is sculptural and some of it is purely sort of recorded sound.
And it was really thinking about recorded sound for this project.
And one of the things I did before I even got here was a lot of research
I tend not to enter into something like this
knowing that I'm going to be here for a month
without really covering my bases and trying to understand a little bit.
So one of the things I wanted to make sure to do was think about
Zion in relation to the people.
What are other people's experiences?
I'm an interloper here, and so you know, there's so many people
who have deep experience, and I really wanted to capture some of that.
So part of it was really thinking about that.
And then the other part was knowing that
there were sites of acoustic significance, things that,
you know, in a canyon that are just bound to sound amazing.
I think most of the time we wouldn't know that they sound amazing
because we're just looking at these photographs of them.
So but you look at a giant arch, you look at some of these alcoves
and caves and, you know, steep canyon walls
and you've got to wonder, you know, what does that place sound like?
So I think all of the research that I had done,
it paid off.
But then a certain amount of it just flew out the window because
as soon as you get to this place, it's like it just knock your socks off.
And I just had to experience it.
So it was really going with my equipment, all of my crazy recorders
and everything, and just going from place to place to place
and just trying to wrap my head around it because
and that took a while.
♪ ♪ ♪
So the equipment
that I brought with me on this trip,
it always sort of changes a little bit
from location to location or what I hope to do.
And because I wasn't totally sure
what I was going to be recording here, I brought a lot of stuff.
So but I think the star of the show for me in this particular
experience has been what's called an ambisonic microphone
and an ambisonic microphone essentially has like four little microphone capsules.
And what it allows you to do is capture sound pretty much in a sphere.
So like virtual reality 360 degree spherical sound.
And that I really wanted to think about that in relation to the canyons
and thinking about, well, you know,
what is what sound is coming from above us?
What sound is, you know, surrounding us in all these different locations.
One of the reasons that was kind of a critical tool
for me here is that I also,
as you'll see around in this, the studio,
I've made eight speakers and a subwoofer.
I brought the sort of driver which are the kind of guts of the speaker,
but I couldn't carry all of these speakers with me on the airplane.
So I brought just the little components
and I got moving boxes and I built my own speakers.
So this studio is a spatialized sound environment.
So at the same time that I'm recording thinking about space, I'm coming back here
and going through those recordings and finding ways
to sort of shape it with the space of, of this room.
♪ ♪ ♪
So how long does it take
for me to go from start to finish with a project?
That is a great question because it just completely varies from project to project.
Sometimes you just capture an amazing thing and it's-
you don't need to do anything to it.
It's just like, this is just magic as is.
And then sometimes it just takes more crafting.
The work that I've been doing here, I honestly thought that I would have
I've got a lot of irons in the fire on my computer right now and
a lot of projects that I'm working on, but I've really been focusing on this one
that deals a lot with wind and water, and I keep coming back to it
and keep working on it so that one I feel like I'm getting close to done.
But you know, that's been almost a month working on that.
But at the same time, I've got all these other little things
that I'm working on too.
[Falling water and loud crashing]
♪ ♪ ♪
I tend to be, you know,
I tend to be that person who can't read one book at once.
I'm always I always have like five different things.
And sometimes I finish them and sometimes I have finished them.
And, and it's sort of the connection
between all those ideas that is really interesting to me.
So one thing I think
sometimes I'll
really focus on one piece, but more often than not I'm thinking across them.
And I think for this project, it's really important that I'm
working on multiple things at once because there's a lot of kind
of cross-talk between these pieces.
And I've interviewed so far, I think six people,
and I'm hoping to get a bunch more in while I'm here.
But those interviews are also these people are not in the same room talking,
and yet there's these amazing themes that keep cropping up from person to person.
And I think that's going to need to be teased out over time
in multiple pieces.
♪ ♪ ♪
So in terms of what I'm looking for
when I'm recording, it changes from day to day
sometimes I'll be told by someone who lives here like, Well,
you really haven't experienced, the sound at Zion
unless you've heard a Canyon Wren.
And so then I'm on the hunt for a Canyon Wren in February,
which I actually found one which was shocking.
So sometimes it's really specific.
Then I'm looking for something, but sometimes
it's really just for me, it was a lot of discovery.
I had no idea what I was going to experience.
I mean, you have assumptions, but
sometimes it was simply like I knew I wanted to capture the sounds of water.
That was an important part of the Zion story, and it's something that I needed to
capture. So
the Virgin River is right here.
That's an easy one.
But there's also lots of seeps and snowmelt
and little dribbling, you know, water coming out of stones.
And I would usually not be looking for them
and find them and be like, oh, I've got to get that.
I think another thing that's really important and something
I wanted to mention is the fact that Zion is also about people.
Zion is currently about 5 million people a year.
And so the noises we make as humans are part of that story, too.
So I have not I don't want to be
that person who shuts out and doesn't recognize the fact
that this is not the same place it was a thousand years ago.
It's changed clearly.
And so collecting some of the just evidence of us as humans, snowplows,
since we had this snowfall, the sound of the shuttle,
the sound of the cars moving in and out, people's voices, helicopters,
airplanes, all of these things are things that shape our experience.
And also importantly, like, we're not the only-
well we are the only people here, I guess we're not the only organisms here.
And the fact that all of these sounds how are they shaping the ability
to communicate of other organisms here?
The birds that stop singing whenever the plane goes over like this
is this is our impact on this acoustic environment.
♪ ♪ ♪
I think
listening here has
reminded me that it takes time
and one of the things I think was just I would go up to some of these places
and just I always would bring my equipment because you just never know.
You just never know what you're going to get and,
you know, oftentimes you'll hit record and then you'll stop recording.
And the most amazing thing happens as soon as you
and soon as you turn your recorder off.
And you know what? I think that's okay.
One of the things I really recognize here, too, is that
what I'm hearing is not the same as what's being recorded.
And I think what you see through the lens of a camera
and what you paint is not the same as being here.
And they have different meanings.
You know, I think a painting or a sound work or a photograph distills
something about the sensibility of the person who who shared that.
But one thing I
notice, I became super interested here in echoes
because it's a canyon and the echoes are so different
from place to place and
how I could only
I can only capture so much of that on a recorder
and there were things that I found magical and amazing
bouncing back at me from the canyon.
And then I would go back to the recordings and it was like, it's there,
but it's like not there.
It's, it's, it's
amazing, you know, and the things that you see,
the thing that's amazing about listening is that we
as humans are constantly amplifying
just through our circuitry, amplifying what what is around us.
Even though the volume may not be so high
we're making it higher with our attention.
And it's that attention.
I think that's like,
what, what's happened to me here is the time
to just be here and the time to just be in one place
and the time to experience one place over and over.
Like it wasn't just a weekend.
I'm here for the month, and I could really, really dig
into a particular location and realize how it's changed over time.
♪ ♪ ♪
So one of the things that
I did while I was at Zion was I would become a bit obsessed
with certain locations.
And one of those was Upper Emerald Pool,
and that was someplace I just needed to experience
in different conditions and to understand how it changes.
Another was up on the East Rim,
which I some of my favorite places were the hikes that I took there.
So there was a particular hike up Pine Creek
that I just kept doing over and over again because the first time it's
it's super fresh and you're you're just taking it in
and you're kind of grappling with the wonder of this amazing place.
The second time you have a little bit more familiarity
and you're able to look for the first specific things and,
and recognize the things that you didn't hear.
And so sometimes I'm hearing new things because there are new things there.
For example, perhaps a Canyon Wren,
but other times
I just wasn't tuned to pay attention to them.
And so that idea of really paying attention and being attentive
and being able to, like, let the place come alive around you.
Part of that is repeated experience and part of that is just spending the time
in a particular place.
♪ ♪ ♪
So do I remember
the soundscapes of places more than visual?
In some ways no, I don't.
But sound is a difficult and elusive sense.
It's not something I think that
I think it has a different connection to our memory than our other senses.
For example, I think we all have had that experience of
smelling something that just zips us right back to childhood, and that's like,
I think, a super powerful sense from memory.
And I think there's something about sound
in its fleetingness and the way that it is,
the way
that we're kind of constantly kind of tuning in and out of sound
that I think makes it different the way that it plays in our memory.
So in some ways, I, like most people,
forget the way places sound
and I think that's one of the reasons I love working with sound
is that it's in some ways you can never really fix sound
in, in the world because it's always different it's always changing.
But I think part of this recording and stuff is like
sort of re understanding what some of those things are.
It's almost like this external memory of these places.
And I think Zion is deserves
to have some of that communicated and some of that story told and shared.
♪ ♪ ♪
My favorite part of being at Zion.
There are two things.
One of them is super specific and one of them is more general.
The super specific is like the second or third day I was here,
I took a hike up to Emerald Pools and it was early
in February and so, you know, it was still pretty cold.
I mean, it's snowing out now.
It's cold now, too, but it was really cold then.
And the icicles were really forming up at Emerald Pool.
And what happened up in that incredible place was that the sun at 9:00
would finally kind of break over the peaks and it would sweep its way
across that sandstone face and it would heat it up.
And all of those icicles just start plummeting.
And some of them are hitting the rocks below.
Some of them are hitting other ice.
Some of them are skittering down under the frozen pond.
And it was amazing while I was there
and sometimes like a
recording doesn't live up to your experience,
but this was- the recording was just astonishing.
I mean, it was incredibly powerful.
And I think that power
kind of set me up for the rest of my trip.
And and it was no surprise that the first thing I started editing
was kind of about intensity.
And because I think that this is an intense place
and it's a challenging place and it can be a dangerous place.
And I think it's important to convey that and how do you convey that with sound?
And so that was kind of emblematic to me
of of some of that power of this place.
One of the things that I really loved about being here
is just the unpredictability of the sound and really not knowing.
And I think obviously if I if I've lived here for 20 years,
it would be perhaps a little bit more predictable or if I studied geology
or if I studied climate and whether I would understand some of these things.
But as an artist coming in part of the thing I think that was sort of
magical is not knowing what was going to happen around every corner.
And I think we know that with our eyes too.
But listening, it was always incredible.
Like you would hear the rush of this river and as soon as you go through a bend
in the canyon or as soon as you dip into a slot canyon, it just disappears
and so there's a kind of natural acoustics of this place.
But then also, you know, February is an interesting time
because if Zion starts waking up a bit, I started hearing
a lot more birds over the course of this and experiencing those things.
And also just sort of seeing that there were these pockets of activity
and I never knew what was going to be, you know, around the next corner.