A Sea of Sound: Dr Ros Bandt

VOICEOVER
Welcome to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.

[in studio improvisation by Ros Bandt, playing the Tarhu]

JACKY ANGUS
Hello and welcome to Up Close coming to you from the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’m Jacky Angus. Today my guest is Dr Ros Bandt composer, researcher and sound artist at the university’s interdisciplinary Australian Centre. Ros Bandt’s musical interests range across numerous genres and instruments. But she is most commonly associated with electro-acoustics and she has specialised in spatial music systems, sound playgrounds, and interactive sound sculptures. Welcome to Up Close, Dr.Bandt.

ROS BANDT
Thank you very much, Jacky.

JACKY ANGUS
I’d like to start with a very basic question. What is so important about sound? What you do with it that is. Combining sound with novel uses of space, movement and visual stimuli.

ROS BANDT
Well, for me the whole universe, we are swimming in a sea of sound constantly, so, for me, I guess I live through my ears, as the dominant sense. Rather than most people, being more visually oriented. I think I have tunnels from my ears to my eyes that way round. You know, as we are moving through our daily lives, the sounds are coming and going in an ever changing musical composition, constantly, in so many different ways. And they are telling us all this information about how we are encoding and passing through our life’s journey. By being attentive to these sounds we are always using a sonic radar, detection systems, for physical orientation and because it is invisible, I think there is some kind of really wonderful, alluring, almost mystical feel about being able to trap it and craft it and work with the vibration of the soundwaves themselves. Because also, they are tremendous tags of cultural orientation. You know, you have just got to go to a country that you have never been to before to realise how important the auditory soundscape is for you in feeling comfortable. You know, what is familiar for us? What is not familiar? And I guess, I was brought up in a very musical family and my father was an inventor. So, for me it was, I just found myself doing this forever. Inventing this sound and making objects. I’m a really curious person. And so, the auditory is a really wonderful world to be curious in.

JACKY ANGUS
You talk about craft, so you are making a distinction there, I guess, between the natural world of sound that we meet everyday that we travel in, as you say, and actually setting it up as an artifice. Am I right, or do you not see that distinction? Do you think that distinction is a bit old hat?

ROS BANDT
I think there are many ways of looking at that and there are lots of artists that do both angles of what you say. Those that just cut a piece of the soundscape and say, ‘that is it’. Others who might work with the soundscape, I know Murray Schafer often says, you know, in a lot of his research projects, where they were trying to understand what the soundscape really was in Canada in the 1970s. That they didn’t want any interference, like of an artistic kind, in that research. But then of course, he was a composer, he is out there winning awards for his environmental soundscape compositions, along with Hildegard Westercamp. And I guess, I work within that whole range of things, as well. But, being an Australian, have a completely different worldview of it. So, for me, I am much more kind of ‘John Cage: everything we do is music’. You can do whatever you like, if you are clever enough, which is what my father always told me. And I think it is the most wonderful thing. And so, I am happy to compose. I’m happy to make multi-channel 5.1 surround sound installations from highly developed and organised soundscapes that might have taken three years to make, in which case the framing is extremely arduous and luckily for me I have the best engineers in the world to help along that path because I couldn’t possibly manage all the data by myself. So, there are all these different levels which one can live and be and work and shape, the soundscape…

JACKY ANGUS
As an artist…

ROS BANDT
Hmmm…

JACKY ANGUS
From the point of view of the person experiencing this, which is, we do a lot know, with sound installations, would you say that the experience is particular important now, for any particular reason? I mean, do we need to get back to basics? Is it something we are doing to understand technology, because this has become very popular now? Since the 80s, there’s a real boom in sound installations and of course you have led most of that boom, is it something we really need, now, is it something that is part of the world we live in?

ROS BANDT
I think that sound installations are a really natural thing to think about your senses walking around and listening. And trying to get people to become more attentive to their position in space and what the auditory lines are saying. And anything that gives the audience an opportunity to go into that world, I think, is really, really important. And, I am seeing now with the demise of home music making and being physically involved in the sound itself, people are tending to sit down and download, they don’t upload, they are downloading what is pre-set -

JACKY ANGUS
So, it is passive…

ROS BANDT
Yes. When you walk in an immersive environment such as one made by Garth Paine or Iain Mott, a large range of people that you can go and experience, 135 sound installations on the website that I have done in Melbourne University. Because I’m very…These ephemeral big works take so much effort to get up. It is very hard to document this thing. But, if you have an opportunity to go and experience one, do it, because it is, living, being in there, the place, with all of your senses that you become part of that living sound composition.

JACKY ANGUS
It is exciting.

ROS BANDT
It is so exciting. Your body is changing this space…You are inter-relating with all the people in that space. Or, if it is a solo one, you have that acoustic space to yourself. In the world we have an enormous amount of hegemonic changes about ‘you will be in this kind of environment now’. In sound installations, you are given an audible canvas in which you are free to paint, and to move through, what the artist set there. And often it is like a playground still.

JACKY ANGUS
One of the things you said was that you thought it was an ephemeral world and that was its beauty, now given that so, how are you going to have rules that stick? Are you going to have a tradition? Are you going to have people in fact remembering any of this stuff? Is it just an instantaneous experience? Which is great fun and spontaneous, but in what sense does it really enrich our cultural life?

ROS BANDT
I think the experience of being fully engaged, mind and body, as a perceiving, fully cognisant, human being is something, a state of consciousness that is rare these days. People don’t even go to church! They are not taking time for contemplation. Unless they absolutely decide to. But as a generic thing, everybody is moving around very quickly. And what we need more than ever are things like peaceful spaces and environments where people can catch up with their sensory information overload. And this is not happening when you are reading a book or just doing one thing, in a sound installation, you are fully aware of your whole self, your mind and your body as you are walking through with all of your senses -

JACKY ANGUS
It is not just another distraction, another type of entertainment…

ROS BANDT
Not at all. I can’t subscribe to this at all. I think what we have done, is dumbed down the senses through entertainment. But I think that people have to really work hard and spend time and give over their senses to understand and comprehend the most beautiful sound installation and cross media and new media art works.

JACKY ANGUS
You’re listening to Up Close, coming to you from the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’m Jacky Angus. And I’m talking to Ros Bandt. Well, Ros, what is your current plan? I know you have got lots of irons in the fire. What is your most favourite research project that you are planning now?

ROS BANDT
I am really stretching my cross-cultural identity now by collaborating with a number of artists from different countries. And last year I made a CD with Erdem Helvacioglu, that’s a wonderful Turkish artist, who in 2007 approached me on the net, and wanted to work with me and came to Australia and we were doing bowed spike fiddle, the tarhu, made by Peter Biffin and audio-mulch live electronics.

JACKY ANGUS
What’s a tarhu?

ROS BANDT
Oh, a tarhu is bowed spike fiddle. An original instrument which Peter Biffin the Australian lute maker from Armadale in New South Wales, Australia, who has an international profile as an instrument maker, makes small tarhus like little kecapis for all the Hindustani and Middle Eastern lyra players and tar players. And this is his invention, which is uniting east and west. And I think this particular instrument just has a lot of the sound of the future for me. It has eight sympathetic strings in a cone, which you can tune to anything that you like. And I’m playing on four cello strings. It has got a big round, beautiful, bee-like, gourd-like, carved resonator inside of which is a ceder cone through which these eight sympathetic strings are attached. So, every single sound I make on this is alive and vibrating. It is like having – I call it my Minotaur. Because it is like you have got this huge bull that is capable of anything at any moment. You can leap on it, or it could eat you and spear you. And it is a completely, wonderfully vibrant instrument. And, so, that is the tar from the Turkish tar and the hu from the Chinese hu. So, I’m working…

JACKY ANGUS
Let’s go into your labyrinth and you play for us now.

ROS BANDT
Okay. [laughs]

JACKY ANGUS
Well, thanks very much Ros. That was a beautiful – both melancholic and energetic sound. You talk about it as having a relationship to other instruments, but it looks unique to me. It is beautiful.

ROS BANDT
It is Tasmanian blackwood. And inside the very fine cone that amplifies and is terribly fragile where the strings are vibrating is made from ceder. So, it is very light inside. And of course, the spike that I have, is made by Ian Watchorn, as is my bow, who is a wonderful historical instruments maker and of course I have had a 30 year life with La Romanesca early music ensemble, so, I’m a player of early music as well, so, it is natural for me to go to a really great maker and now if we have a look at the bow that I’m playing with, this is Surinam snakewood which is very springy and the hair is from Mongolia and the frog is made from 30,000 year old mammoth tusk, from Siberia. And so, what is happening to Ros Bandt is that I’ve become the tarhu nomad. And I want to go to all of the places where all of these elements are from. I only do site specific improvisations on this instrument. And I do use it in the free music ensemble as a noise machine because it is capable of amazing sounds because of the bow, while you heard lyric before, the harmonics, the overtones are so amazing that you could swear that this is the wind. [plays the tarhu]

JACKY ANGUS
My goodness yes. It is a very adaptable instrument, too.

ROS BANDT
Yeah.

JACKY ANGUS
It seems to be so many things in there.

ROS BANDT
I can go with my laptop and the tarhu and do pretty well a huge number of things. I can play early music on it. I can play the viola da gamba repertoire, I can play medieval monedi of Galician-Portuguese or Spanish. I guess, for me, life is a wonderful gift to have the breath and the opportunity to make sound and this tarhu affords me the same kind of – it is like an international pen of the non-verbal, through sound to communicate and it is quite astounding to just sit in a Turkish studio with somebody you barely know and put a CD down straight to air in one day.

JACKY ANGUS
You are listening to Up Close, coming to you from the University of Melbourne, Australia. I’m Jacky Angus. And I’m talking to Dr.Ros Bandt. Now, Ros, what took you to Japan?

ROS BANDT
That is a very interesting question and one that I have wrestled with, about whether I would ever go to Japan. Japanese and French aesthetics have really had a huge influence on my practice and what I admire. It’s that kind of thing where you think you’ll never have enough language or enough protocol to be bothered going. You’d just be a nuisance, you know. And so, I had sent work and not gone before. And given the gigs to other people. And I thought, if I ever go, I would really like to be invited go and just sit in a monastery in Kyoto or something and paint, because I’ve actually done sumi-e and things like this. Anyway, a lovely Japanese woman comes to a lecture I am giving when I am asked to consult on the acoustics of our national museum in Canberra, and Kumi comes to this lunch and she is saying to me, ‘do you know anyone in Japan that has a hydrophone?’ And I say, ‘no, I don’t actually, but I’ve got a hydrophone.’ And she said, ‘what are you doing in ten days time? I’m wanting to go and find the endangered sound of the Japanese sea-whistle, the isobue.’

JACKY ANGUS
What’s that?

ROS BANDT
That is the sound that the Japanese ama women-fisher-folk make when they hold their breath free diving, go down and cut abalone from the bottom of the sea in one breath. They used to do this at the time of The Pillow Book, we are talking about 800AD, from then, it is a continuing sustainable fishing tradition. They still do this. One of the James Bond movies has an ama in it. So it has been a bit romanticised. And there are various books and novels about it. But, the women are really tribal sea-folk. And I was so lucky to be taken to a remote island of Sagashima, with Kumi, to do a research. I thought that was a great idea. I’m really interested in cultural heritage of sound. And iconic sound. And this was one of the sounds in Japan that had been nominated for the 150 Sounds of Japan project. Because some cultures, they actually, enjoy their sound heritage and they celebrate it and they use it. And I thought this will be a great opportunity, I’ll go and be with Kumi and be her helper. And I’ll sit there and listen. So, I did and I recorded about 20 CDs worth of field material, for her, the women’s’ stories. We did hydrophone recordings of the diving, we went to festivals, we really covered a huge amount and when I got home I thought ‘my goodness, what am I going to do with all of this?’ I gave, of course, everything to Kumi, for her research and she wrote a chapter for the book that I was editing on ‘hearing places’ which is a wonderful chapter, and then I thought, ‘my goodness, this is way too important, all of this.’ And it affected me deeply, the fact that the Japanese people have all the senses deeply embedded in their characters and in their text. And, I put in a proposal to the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and it was accepted for the radiophonic residency, so I was able to spend a couple of years, composing and doing post-production on these beautiful recordings. The double-CD, Isobue, which I have dedicated to Kumi Kato in finding the Japanese sea whistle that we might be in tune with the environment and like the women, waiting for the tide and not taking too much.

[Excerpt from Isobue]

JACKY ANGUS
You are a real chameleon, Ros Bandt. Thank you for being on Up Close.

ROS BANDT
Thank you very much, Jacky.

JACKY ANGUS
Our guest today was renowned Australian sound artist, Dr.Ros Bandt and we thank her for appearing on Up Close. Relevant links, a full transcript and more information on this episode can be found at our website at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.. You may leave a comment about any episode of Up Close by clicking at the link at the bottom of the page. Melbourne University Up Close is brought to you by the Marketing and Communications Division, in association with Asia Institute at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Up Close is created and produced by Eric van Bemmel and Kelvin Param. Our audio is Craig McArthur. Musical theme performed by Sergio Ercole.  I’m Jacky Angus. Until next time. Thank you for joining us on Up Close. Goodbye.


VOICEOVER
You’ve been listening to Melbourne University Up Close, a fortnightly podcast of research, personalities and cultural offerings of the University of Melbourne, Australia.  Up Close is available on the web at upclose.unimelb.edu.au.   Copyright 2009, University of Melbourne.