*Acoustic Journal No. 1: A California Nature Chronicle*
I’m creating an intimate sonic portrait of California's diverse ecosystems, weaving together field recordings, artistic illustrations, and lyrical prose crafted from personal immersion, scientific perspectives and local voices - from indigenous knowledge-keepers to naturalists. Through the lens of sound, this chronicle inverts the traditional relationship between text and sonic documentation. Taking inspiration from vinyl albums and their detailed liner notes, this work pairs a pocket-sized illustrated book with a rich digital collection of field recordings, blending traditional nature writing with acoustic journalism to invite deeper relations with wild places.
Acoustic journalism is what I call the gathering and sharing of stories through sound as both artistic medium and documentary tool. Here I’ll share a few examples of field recordings and experiments with this type of acoustic story-finding.
Below I’m archiving episodes of Local Locations, a radio show I’ve co-hosted or subbed in for Ernst Karel. His show offers extended recordings of sonic environments documented by Ernst, myself, Cheryl Leonard, and Mark Lipman.
“We can’t care about something if we feel no connection to it. And even without describing it as {whale} song, the sounds themselves are musical to our consciousness I think. And through that sound, through hearing it, we feel a connection to life that is otherwise so remote from our everyday experience.“ - John Ryan, oceanographer and senior research specialist at Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, on Local Locations.
Sandhill Cranes fly in to roost at Woodbridge Ecological Reserve in Northern California. November, 2019. The cranes concentrate on roosting sites in the open, shallow parts of the river at night, where they can see and hear danger coming.
These images are slices of three different spectrograms of the first recording below, “Five Broad Ecosystems of Point Reyes National Seashore.” I’ve been working with fellow recordists Ernst Karel, Cheryl Leonard, and Mark Lipman, the Point Reyes National Seashore Association, and the park service on a longterm field recording project documenting the National Seashore.
I thought it’d be interesting to offer an overview of the different ecosystems in one recording. We start up high in a Douglas fir forest , then make our way through different parts of Oak woodland - both dry and stream areas - then we’ll go down to coastal shrub and then take a nice long stop in the wetlands. After that we’ll travel over to inland prairie and coastal grasslands and finally make our way down to sand dunes and the coastline.