The Joy Stretch
The other day I went down to the creek to record some frog sounds with my kids, who are 11 and 6, and I discovered - not just the eastern common froglet - but a crack in the fabric of the universe that my children have been visiting for some time.
I didn’t recognise it as a portal to another world at first - I thought it was just my son’s tendency to exaggerate - to call the impermanent creek near our house “a raging river”, the mound with a few weeds on it a “perilous mountain” and the patch of remnant degraded bushland “a foreboding forest”. I wanted to correct him - he was messing with the script in my head of this sound recording… then I stopped myself… and just sat with being taken to a magical parallel world in his imagination.
The power of subjective viewpoints in sound have been the focus of my attention lately - I gave a public lecture recently where I waxed poetic about how audio-only media constructs immersive frameless worlds as the subjects sees it… and how powerful a tool this is in world building.
So now I’m down the rabbit hole working on a piece that explores different ways of seeing and listening - in particular - ways of perceiving the little bit of bushland where my kids play….
One curious thing I’ve found is that everyone I interview down at the creek responds to the question of ‘what do you see’ by talking about what is invisible to me. They describe a relationship or a memory or a desire for the place rather than what they see with their eyes…. Different things emerge as I put this together - stories of the past can twist into visions of the future…I’m really quite excited by it all.
The short piece above is an extract I’m working on today - as well as little bit of my heart melting. I was trawling through these rushes thinking ‘there is nothing in here - I’m cutting confetti and wasting my time’ - and then I press play and I’m taken - to a place that that reminds me of my own childhood experiences running in bush creeks - and a world that makes me smile because these brave travellers navigating alternate worlds and time warp continuums are my very own children, and when I’m quiet they let me tag along with them.
Credits
Produced by Kyla Brettle
Music by Rob Law
License
CC BY-NC-ND-SA (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerrivatives-ShareAlike)