idea of south - resonances of location and memory

Glenn Gould radio documentary - The Idea of North
Glenn Gould | Dec 28, 1967 | 59:14

Gould’s first "contrapuntal radio documentary" and the first installment in his "Solitude Trilogy." Originally broadcast on the CBC Radio programme Ideas, Dec. 28, 1967. An anthropologist, sociologist, a nurse, and a surveyor discuss the subjective 'idea' and the reality of the North. Montage and voice counterpoint are used to express the antagonism and scope of the country, the loneliness and isolation, the warmth of community living, personal reasons for living there, the fear that human nature will gradually take over from the elements as common enemy number one, and the challenge involved in any decision to live there. During the last eight minutes the voices are heard over music.

Listen: http://www.cbc.ca/player/Radio/More+Shows/Glenn+Gould+-+The+CBC+Legacy/Audio/1960s/ID/2110447480/



Roger Mills' Idea of South

Inspired by resonances of location and memory, Idea of South sets out to explore, provoke and question our sense of place in the southern hemisphere. Combining networked terrestrial radio and Internet streaming, the work is composed as three individual audio tracks, comprising live music, field recordings and spoken word. The three audio streams are broadcast simultaneously and experienced by listeners tuning their radios into both radio stations and a home computer or iPhone for the Internet stream. As the program moves through hot dry deserts or icy Antarctic waters, the sense of these locations is enhanced through the diffusion of sound over a multi-channel broadcast, taking radio out of the singular domain that it normally inhabits into an immersive radiophonic experience. I also encourage listeners to experiment with the position of their devices. Involving them in this process further enhances their experience of the work.

Idea of South is a culmination of two separate projects. The first, Tohora, a fugue for trumpet and whale is inspired by a hydrophone recording of a Minky whale my father captured off Macquarie Island. I was intrigued by the similarities in timbre of the whale song to my own trumpet playing and composed a work of contrapuntal textures in response to the recording. This was performed as a live Internet stream at Placard Headphones festival in San Francisco in December 2008 and became the main melodic theme of Idea of South. Tohora (a fugue for trumpet and whale) is currently installed as part of Audio on Loop at Loop Space Gallery, Newcastle.

The second project was a collaboration with artist Neil Jenkins on an interactive web map installation. Part phonography and part psychogeography, the map is a sound journey around the southern hemisphere, which unfolds as participants move their cursors over chosen locations. These individual audio segments can then be mixed in separate player windows to form a sound collage of the cursors movement around the map. The location recordings are contributions from sound artists and phonographers throughout the southern hemisphere from an advertised call for submissions. I received recordings from locations as diverse as New Zealand and Uruguay, all accompanied by latitude and longitude coordinates and personal stories about the locations where they were recorded. The sound map is an ongoing project and continues to grow as more contributions are added, and selected recordings from the map form an integral part of the radiophonic work.
http://www.realtimearts.net/studio-artist/idea-of-south

soundmap: http://ideaofsouth.netpraxis.net/map/