Absent Listener - March 2020 by Darren Copeland

The Absent Listener is a series of pieces derived exclusively from long duration soundscape recordings made outdoors at my home, a rural property 22 KM west of the village of South River, Ontario, Canada. The recordings were made unattended, which means that once the recording button was pressed I left the location of the recording only to return every 12 to 14 hours to change the battery.

This 60-minute piece is the second one composed in the series and it is derived from a continuous soundscape recording between March 16 and 18, 2020, which was close to the start of the COVID-19 social distancing measures in my area. This piece follows a previous 45-minute piece in the series which is based on outdoor recordings from February 2019 at my home. If my location of the recordings were in an urban setting then the difference in the soundscape would be more pronounced then it is between these two pieces. The difference in my case has more to do with seasonal changes between mid-winter and late-winter as well as the slight difference in location of the microphones with this piece being located at the shoreline rather than 1000 feet uphill from the shoreline.

The circumstances for composing the two pieces was also different. The first piece was composed for a multichannel sound system which had the advantage of distributing in space several recordings playing at the same time. With the second piece made for no particular occasion, and during the social distancing measures, the assumed audience member would - at least theoretically - be listening in isolation on headphones or a personal stereo system.

With that in mind I chose to make the experience more intimate and spare by avoiding any obvious layering of content. Instead I focused on sequencing together singular moments. It was an interesting period of three days as the weather shifted from high winds, to rain, and then to freezing cold temperatures with periods of sunshine and snow. Through all of this the ice on the lake was in the process of thawing and then freezing again making these distinctive low frequency “whoop” sounds at different periods. Bird life was also more apparent in this piece with woodpeckers, blue jays and chickadees all coming to visit the microphone and inspect it up close at different times.

The recording equipment for this piece used the same two DPA 4060 miniature omni-directional microphones separated by a boundary. The mics were about four feet from shore under some trees. The stereo recordings are used in this piece with very minimal signal processing for equalization. The piece follows the chronological order of the recordings. Recordings were selected and arranged to evoke a sense of the natural rhythms and nuances of events as they unfold without my presence.

Thank you to the Canada Council for the Arts whose funding allowed for the recording system to be built and this composition to be made.