Combining aural and visual elements of a place can be a powerful way of exploring the intersections of time, history and geographical features that exist within a location. I am interested in using aspects of the landscape – such as field recordings and cartographical information – as a way of exploring the history of a place and the multitude of temporalities that can exist together in place. I create my works from a combination of field recordings, both original and altered through various effects such as delay, echo, distortion, and time-stretching (through Adobe Audition and Ableton, two digital audio workstations), combined with rendering maps into a digital virtual instrument with Iannix, an open-source graphical sequencer that turns shapes and lines into cursors and trigger points for creating sound. The Swan [Derbarl Yerrigan] (2022) was originally created as part of a series of work commissioned by the State Library of Western Australia and West Australian Music, as part of a re-imagining of the State Library’s maps collection. The work combines a map of the Perth area from the 1890s, rendered into an digital virtual instrument, with field recordings taken from modern-day Perth, as a way of demonstrating how landscape can both be inspiration, and active participant, of a composition.
