The Gazebo’s exposure to the elements allowed all environmental sound-from birds, insects, and lizards, and the movement of wind and water-to seamlessly blend into produced sounds and transgress supposed barriers between the “natural” and “synthetic,” inviting participants to experience and contribute to a complex sonic dimension.įormal classes began with “Introduction to Sound Editing,” Jaar’s module on Ableton Live, which introduced participants to composition, sampling, and production.
#Graphic river sound free
A key architectural conduit for this pedagogy was the Gazebo, a roofed, circular pavilion at the center of the farm that doubled as a space for formal classes and informal jam sessions in collective free time.
#Graphic river sound software
As part of these programs, participants engaged and experimented with Ableton Live, a widely used digital audio workstation, and Open Broadcaster Software (OBS), an open-source broadcasting and video-editing software. Musician and artist Nithin Shams led a deep-listening session on sonic meditation in which the drone provided a central sonic quality, and software engineer Jagannath Sampath led demonstrations of his open-source digital synthesizer and visualization tool DIN is Noise. Rana Ghose, a filmmaker and producer of REProduce Artists, led a module on livestreaming that considered the technical elements of online broadcasting and the aesthetics of circulation.
Sound researcher and artist Bint Mbareh led a module exploring materialist readings of sound and music in lived contexts, in collaboration with Jaar. Nicolás Jaar, a musician and artist Aditya Kapoor (Flux Vortex), an artist, producer, and musician and Krishna Jhaveri, a sound artist, musician and mix engineer, led practical modules on sonic and musical composition, sound synthesis and mixing, and sound perception and field recording, respectively. Drawing on the history of displacement of indigenous communities in the region and informed by the instructing artists’ own research and politics, the modules assembled a toolkit of sorts, offering strategies for listening to sound anew and incorporating this sonic and material vocabulary into musical and experimental productions that could take shape through the participants’ individual practices. The driving forces behind Free.wav 2.0’s practical modules were the demystification of sound and music production and the remystification of the sensible, as rooted in critiques of various systems, including knowledge, and nationalism, economics. View of the Bhavani River and the bankside path through wilderness. 1 The Bhavani River, which runs alongside Bhoomi Farms, served as a site for collective exploration and an axis for discovery of the landscape, transmitting stories of the region’s environmental movements, migrations, and displacements of indigenous communities. For the last half-century, Attapadi has been a site of people-led environmental activism and conservation, including the successful protest of a hydroelectric dam project that threatened to flood an ecologically significant forest area, which has since become Silent Valley National Park. The intensive program tethered us to the soundscape of the farm, topography of the region, and Attapadi’s history. During the residency, which I was invited to attend as a writer-in-residence, sixteen participants were led to engage in sonic speculation and to think about (deep) listening as a layered practice with political and aesthetic potential. Hosted by Nithin Shams and curated in collaboration with Aditya Kapoor, Free.wav 2.0 emphasized open exchange and introduced tools, frameworks, and concepts that could be deployed fluidly in sound production.
An unintended preview of what was to come over the next week, we participants and instructors would go on to train our ears in close listening, charting across diverse physical, political, and sonic terrain and encountering several such instances of the total synthesis of sound, from the organic to the simulated.įree.wav 2.0, a sonic arts and electronic music residency, took place in March 2023 at Bhoomi Farms, a family-run fruit farm amid the riverine landscape of Attapadi, Kerala, India, and the protected tropical rainforest of Silent Valley National Park. This synthesized warbling of insects returned to us as produced sound, creating a duet with their natural vocalizations until it became impossible to differentiate one from the other. Further across the farm, Aditya Kapoor and the participants who had arrived before Free.wav 2.0 officially began were tweaking with an assemblage of electronics at the Gazebo-the “highest density of technology” in the region, a participant furtively noted-from which the same harmonized sonic environment was recorded, warped, and played back. On my first evening at Bhoomi Farms, while I was chatting with Bint Mbareh and Nicolás Jaar, an electrical fuse blew, immersing us in complete darkness and the farm’s natural soundscape.
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