This piece is an episode of Absorbed Terrain – a series of conversations with researchers and musicians working within the venn diagram of sound and environment curated by Mara Schwerdtfeger.
On a warm Saturday afternoon, Mara speaks with Yuin First Nations sound scholar and artist Hayden Ryan walking from Penders Park to All Nations Park and back again. Hayden’s work centres Indigenous sonic and spatial practices to clarify the inextricable links between land, body, sound and culture within Indigenous knowledge systems. By utilising sound technologies, specifically Ambisonics, Hayden aims to recentre the colonial disruption of sound and space within cultural practice.
This conversation was recorded on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung. We pay our respects to elders past and present and are privileged to be living in a landscape full of story and song that has been continuing for over 65,000 years. Sovereignty was never ceded. This was and always will be Aboriginal land.
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Mara Schwerdtfeger It's so nice to be walking on Wurundjeri Country and nice to be visiting and be able to meet you here.
Hayden Ryan Thanks for visiting.
MS And I want to start each conversation kind of just hearing how this place specifically now is influencing you either sonically or otherwise, and maybe also because I know that you didn't grow up here, like maybe how your relationship to where you grew up is different or similar?
HR Yeah, I grew up on Yuin Land, well actually was born on Gumbaynggirr Land on the North Coast, and then moved down to Country on the south east coast of New South Wales, where it's like population 10,000 or something, 8,000, when I was there. And moving to somewhere like Melbourne, actually when I first moved to Melbourne, I lived in the CBD on university accommodation.
MS Wow, that would have been a shock.
HR Which was definitely a shock, yeah. I've traveled a lot since I was young around the world, and I've had like a very quick appreciation for where I come from. Like, that sort of happened really early on in my teenage years. I feel like a lot of that as a teenager doesn't necessarily get considered. So, like my appreciation for Country started for me really early and when I come and live in different cities, I always reflect on what I miss about home, which is something that is definitely coming out in the more recent work that I've been doing. But living down here in Naarm, in Thornbury, Darebin, has been a good sort of breath of fresh air.
I lived here before I moved to New York in 2022 and now I've moved back to pretty much the same area, and there's just something about like the calmness of the suburb that lets me breathe and create.
Thank you car.
Thornbury is a place where a lot of the opportunities that I've gotten have happened – I graduated from RMIT, I got scholarships to go to the US. So I've had a lot of very emotional moments.
MS It holds all those moments for you.
HR Yeah, yeah.
MS Are there any specific sound associations that have struck you here?
HR Well, the trams obviously. Anyone who lives in Melbourne, like the trams are iconic.
There's a magpie that hangs out outside of my apartment that must have one of the most complex magpie calls that I've ever heard, and that I recorded one day and used in a project with a friend in New York. And he talks about the magpie and I mentioned that, to quote, ‘it's got a beautiful song.’ And like, it's something that I had never thought of before.
MS Just because you've never paid full attention, do you think? Or just never thought to put it into words?
HR Yeah, and also that the idea that we have of the magpie is like that it swoop, you know. And we've got this one dimensional idea, I find like a lot of people here have of the magpie in that it swoops. But until you throw a song in the spectrogram and look at how crazy its spectrum is.
MS How complex those songs are as well.
HR Yeah, exactly.
MS Yeah. Well, your practice is very technologically grounded. I mean it's interesting working in digital media and you have to kind of balance this technical skill and conceptual thinking.
HR Yep.
MS But I'm curious, like what that balance is like for you and also if there's any crossovers that you've observed – like within how technology functions and how we scope the world and translate the world.
HR Yeah, yeah definitely. I think there's a beauty in understanding how your tools, your like artistic tools work. And I had the privilege of being able to study that during my masters overseas. And Ambisonics was something that I stumbled across towards the end of my undergrad in Melbourne and wanted to really look into it because there was something about the technique that took me by surprise.
When I was overseas I kind of centred my research in my master's thesis around how Ambisonics works acoustically.
And one of the things that I remember reading was that the first, like defining thing of the microphone wasn't to pick up sound, but was to pick up energy – like the thing that's happening. I don't know, there’s something poetic about that.
MS Yeah, when they're writing that and using the word ‘energy’ they probably mean it in a technological, physics way.
HR Yeah, in the physics term.
MS But you can translate it into a poetic, conceptual term as well.
HR Yeah, definitely. And the thing that I really loved about it as well is that, like, it's not taken from an egocentric point of view. It's not based around listening. It's based around the movement of sound and the air waves. So in terms of like that, with my own practice, I guess, like … watch out doggy …
The removal of the ego is something that I found was in a lot of indigenous sound literature that I read, and relating that to my own heritage and my own upbringing, I saw that as a crossover.
And the more I sort of thought about it conceptually, Ambisonics is a technique that captures that movement in space, removes the ego and I guess in theory can capture like a spatial being instead of a talking subject or talking object.
MS Yeah. I thought that was a really interesting observation because I was that you presented at the , and you talk about shifting the language from decolonizing these practices and indigenising them instead. And kind of just shifting that language, changes it dramatically.
HR Yeah, no definitely. And that's something that caught me by surprise when, like right in the middle of my master's thesis, came over to talk and I think it was [who] was saying that when mob enter a space, any space, we need to think if our position or our artistic statement is to decolonise or to indigenise. I think that holds a lot of power and using those words interchangeably gives ….
MS It changes the agency, changes the intention.
HR Yeah, exactly. My thesis was called Decolonising Sound Technology, and on the day I changed it to Indigenising Sound Technology because that's what I had sort of come to figure. And it kind of centres back to that idea of Ambisonics capturing the spatial being, the resonant body, as opposed to the voice. And just the voice is like a monophonic object.
MS Yeah.
HR These technologies exist, but the reality is that they sit so high up in institutions and they sit behind paywalls and they sit behind gatekeepers.
MS How do we make them more accessible?
HR I always think, like, what happens if you replace all Zoom H6s with Ambisonic microphones? How do we behave differently when you're given that technology? Well, the first thing is that they record in 360 degrees. So you're going to be positioned differently. Your zoom recorder isn't going to be pointed at one source because it's going to include all sources.
This is a thought that I had when I was watching a powwow. Powwow songs are performed in circles. Corroborees and ceremonies are performed circles. So how do you, quote-unquote, “authentically” capture that with a microphone? Yeah, I spent too much time thinking about all of that stuff.
MS But also the listening experience of that as well, because I still vividly remember when I got to listen to binaural microphones and how I felt almost like a disassociation with my body because the microphones were placed just next to me. It was very disembodying and that was just binaural. So.
HR It’s crazy, yeah.
MS It’s powerful technology.
[Binaural Field Recording, recorded with Thembi Soddell during the SIGNAL Sound program] Rain Crackle
MS It's really interesting this changing of a sound-being into an object. Once it becomes an object, it loses agency. And it's interesting to think about that in a digital sense as well with audio – once it becomes an object, it can so easily be displaced and how that then leads to assimilation or appropriation. So by capturing with Ambisonics you're capturing that spatialisation as well.HR Yeah. , and said that to record as an ethnographer extracts the linguistic and musical aesthetics of a culture, or an indigenous culture. And those things are important, but also existing and practicing spatially is important and that is something that you can't necessarily achieve with one monophonic microphone.
So that indigenising of the technology through understanding how cultural practice works and the values of cultural practice, essentially re-integrates those nuances back into something like ethnography, so to say. I think that's really important.
You can go through Thomas Edison's notes – he includes the ideas that today we are recognising as colonial. I mean, they've always been colonial, but like those quotes that I pulled out, that sound recording will allow for the indefinite multiplication and preservation of voices beyond death is crazy.MS That was quite shattering to read those quotes and see that from the start of audio recording that was the intention. That ‘oh, once we've got this recorded preservation of it, who cares what happens?’ We can lose care, rather than take more care from, you know, using these recordings to help us understand.
HR Yep, and then he gave one to Jesse Walter Fewkes to go and test. And he went and tested those on Native American communities and the Passamaquoddy in Maine only got those recordings back in 2019.
MS Wow.
HR Which is also insane, so like when you say that those ideas are embedded, like they are literally embedded.
MS Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a push and pull when we're discussing these things. There's an educational benefit and a knowledge sharing of archives and recording. But I guess, yeah, there's a right way to do it and there's a less reductive way to do it. I mean, it's important to question what happens to sound when it is removed from an environment. Did you do listening in and out of context? How did you explore that dynamic?
HR I think it was more of a re-contextualization. Well I guess re-contextualization to an extent is being out of context.
MS But rebuilding the context, I guess, could be like, you know, a repatriation as well.
HR Yeah, no definitely. , the practice that it's based on, is recording my Gumbaynggirr mate in New York at NYU's ensemble rehearsal room, and he was reciting his poetry, and it includes language and story and love of Country and colonial force.
Hayden Ryan and Dakota Feirer – Ambisonic recording [Stereo mix]
HR Hearing that and watching him do that in that space – in like a heavily colonial institution – was one thing. Well I guess, is the re-contextualisation. But also listening to him talk about how he found comfort and how he grounded himself in that practice, kind of puts its original context back into it in a way. I remember one of the things that he said was that he found the sky.
MS Yeah, you talk about him speaking to the horizon.
HR Yeah, and like in that room there is the tiniest sliver of horizon because it's right near Broadway and there's just buildings everywhere, and there's the tiniest bit of sky that you can see. That's how he grounded himself.
MS I feel like that process for Dakota would have been really interesting as well, because he is also working with a medium that gets restricted in terms of publishing. I've been lucky enough to see him perform as well, and it is a very different experience to reading it on the page.
HR It is, absolutely.
MS And I like that you talk about really acknowledging all those subtleties of the voice. And how the voice is not just what is heard, but how we move with it. How we gesture or how we hold ourselves in a room and…
HR Yeah, definitely. And there's so much more to that day that I didn't mention. Like, one of the more powerful moments is when he started to perform and he took his shoes and shirt off and just, like, took the biggest breath in. And it was just like he had created that space for himself.
And … God this road always gets me.
MS We can have some nice traffic ambiance for a moment.
HR Yeah, yeah. Great traffic ambience.
That sort of establishment of his sovereignty, of his acoustic sovereignty was a large part of what made me want to write that paper and submit it, because in that moment when he did that, he had claimed that space. And I thought that was so powerful considering the context that we were in.
MS There's like a layering happening of he has to find his grounding first before then he can be recorded, which is going to lift him from that grounding. But to have that firm foundation to go from holds it down slightly.
HR Yeah. Exactly.
MS You mentioned this term acoustic sovereignty, or like it's a title that you've been working with a lot. Can you expand on what that means for you and your practice? I mean it's a big term.
HR It's a massive term.
MS But at its essence maybe?
HR Yeah, and it's something that I'm still sitting with because yeah, like I said, it's such a loaded term and its . But it was also, I guess, a pending title for when I finish my PhD.
And I think that, as it stands at the moment, acoustic sovereignties is this indigenising of sound and the technologies that accompany it. It's creating spaces and opportunities for education around sound. It's resisting Western limitations and appropriations of sonic culture.
It's something that I would love to talk about, but it's like one of those, you know, when you just have a thought that isn't fully formed yet and you try to get it out, but you can't.
MS But it's going to come out in all of these projects that you're doing and all these different practices, and then eventually you'll have the vocabulary.
HR Exactly, exactly.
Hayden Ryan – [Excerpt]
Exhibited at West Space as part of The place we do not know is the place we are looking for
MS I’m curious about how you've been looking back at archives and kind of, I guess, we’ve kind of touched on the flaws that they have and the consequences that they've had of like de-spatialistion. Are there aspects of them that you're taking with you into your practice as well?
HR Yeah. I think in terms of, like if I'm on a scale, I'm more towards the burn-them-all-down, take-what-you-can-get-and-run mindset. Only because like in terms of sound archives, it's clear that we can do them so much better. The technology that's available in terms of like what I've been using is so capable of capturing the things that sound archives go out to achieve.
Though it's funny that you ask about sound archives now, because I'm in a bit of a pickle with working with a collection at the moment that have come back to me and said that they don't have any Aboriginal sound recordings.
I think where I'm at at the moment with sound archives is that it's great that we have the ability to capture the voice and capture these stories, but remember that our memory and our acoustic memory isn't limited to how ..
MS To what's presented through them
HR Exactly, and isn't limited to stories and language, but transcends that into the sounds of Country and the sounds of our family and community. And the project that I want to do is to show that. And I've been exploring this for two days and talking to mob at campus, at Ngarara Willim, and have already found that like what I thought was significantly an Aboriginal experience is only my own. The things that I think we all share are the same but are completely different sonically.
And one of the things that I found through my exploration is that, like on the East Coast a lot of my family, if we see each other in public, we have a whistle. And I was talking to the staff at Ngarara Willim yesterday, I'm like, ‘do you guys do that whistle? You know the [whistles] one?’
And they're like, ‘no, no, we do this’. And there were clicks and there were whistles and there were different sounds that they made with their mouth, that was like the signal of their community. And I thought that that was just so mind blowing because I thought we all did that whistle, but …
MS I guess that's the thing with archives or like just media in general, is you start to think that's the universal experience then as well because that’s what you are being told through media.
HR Yeah, exactly.
MS Are you looking to fill those gaps in the archive, or is it more about acknowledging that it isn't one universal experience then?
HR Yeah, I think acknowledging that it’s not a universal experience is important, but I want to be able to share with community that diversity, but also have those moments that are like, ‘oh, I recognise that’. ‘Oh, that's the bell bird from Narooma’ or ‘that's the clanging of a metal spoon in a mug in the morning, and the news is in the background’. I want to be able to show the difference, but I also want people to feel the similarity and recognise things that we all recognise.
MS Yeah, sometimes it's like the most specific sound is actually the one that can trigger the universal feeling.
HR One of the crazier sonic memories that someone had was of, they said it was the sound of the wind changing and the crows calling because that signaled a long, dry season. And that in itself, as a memory, is insane, first of all.
MS That's pretty amazing. It's like what the sound can recall beyond the sonic.
HR Yeah, exactly.
MS This greater context.
HR But that was the first thing that they went to when I gave them that prompt.
That transcends linguistic knowledge, like it's the knowledge of how our environment works and behaves, and it's interlinked. These sounds are interlinked with Country because they're informing us on how Country changes and moves.
The other one was, there was a bird, the curlew in Queensland. And he said that, ‘oh anyone in Queensland would recognise the curlew but make sure it's played everywhere, because if someone hears it over their left shoulder, then it's a symbol of death’.
MS So you've got to be careful how you then place these sounds again.
HR Yeah, yeah. And that goes back into the idea of spatial recording and monophonic recording and listening as a spatial practice.
MS But then also the publishing of that and the presentation of that. Once they are published whose hands are they going into and how are they being used.
HR Yep, so that's one that I have to think about, if I'm going to use that.
[Field Recording]
[Field Recording]
MS I also have been thinking about how we favour the human voice so much. And as you were saying, that knowledge – we need it said to us in words, but starting to recognise how sound is knowledge in other ways. But also just how we balance those voices of Country, human voice, bird song, and how we then go about recording those and publishing those and like, what are the rights that Country holds or that the bird holds once they are recorded and become this object.HR Definitely is a huge part of what I do. Or more so informs how I use the material. I think even beyond that into who's allowed to listen to the stories that I capture or the words that I capture is important. That was a big thing that I put into my master's thesis project that was . And the thing around that was only one person is allowed to listen to it based on ideas of respect and trust and the intimacy that's created when an Aboriginal knowledge holder shares knowledge, but also like thinking about exhibition spaces or experiencing a piece of art as a novelty, something that can just be consumed partially.
MS I mean especially with temporal art where it’s so often fragmented because of the focus required or the space that it’s in.
HR So it was really humbling to hear that they wanted to exhibit that piece and they were willing to respect those requirements. That wasn't something that went into the conceptualisation of the recording. It's something that came out of the recording practice after I'd captured that material. I was like this has to be listened to in a specific way for these reasons.
MS I guess, how do we continue to impose those, I guess not limitations, but just respect on these archives or these recordings. Because sound is so immaterial in a lot of ways, how do we protect it?
HR Exactly, and I think the right answer is not with the Western law at all. I mean like when you think of copyright laws that are sound focused, music is protected for something like 70 years after the death of the creator. And how do you do that for songlines that are thousands of years old? Should they be recorded? Yeah, that’s another PHD.
MS Then also acknowledging the body as the archive as well and that things can change and that's okay. That's part of it and that's part of its story. It doesn't need to be this fixed recording ...
HR Yeah, exactly.
MS … that then kind of stagnates that story or that trajectory of the culture as well.
HR I mean Aboriginal history is famously an oral tradition.
MS I unfortunately didn't get to see the work at West Space. I arrived a few days too late. But from what I could get from the writing around it, this idea of white noise, and that's something that I've kind of been talking through with some other people, is just noise in general, and how we have tendencies to look at noise is a really negative thing.
But I'm curious how you chose to use noise in that context because, again, you were flipping the language. You know, changing the with the literal to the conceptual. So how did that come into the work?
HR The literal part of it is that white noise is heavily used to create the soundscape, but has been used in a way that filters out the frequencies that we don't need to create sound sources.
So white noise as an audio signal is a distribution of all the frequencies, and sound is a combination of frequencies. So by that logic, any sound ever exists in white noise and can be extracted. So the literal part of that is creating the sounds of bell birds and creating the sounds of a campfire and wedge tailed eagle and sculpting those out of white noise, which is a technique called procedural modeling and it's a form of algorithmic sound design.
MS That sounds fiddly.
HR Very, very fiddly but I found that when I would go and get recordings of the bell birds and the wedge tailed eagles and look at their spectrum, that it lets you understand, you know, the entity that you're trying to mimic. I use a lot of bell birds because there were heaps of bell birds in Narooma and I thought that like their calls were so powerful, but they sit in such a high register in the frequency spectrum. It feels really impressive that they create the sound that they do in the areas that they did that had such amazing reverb. And I wanted to try and replicate that. I don’t know, I felt a lot closer to the …
MS Well you're looking at so much detail that your understanding of them sonically must bring you closer to them.
HR Yep, exactly.
[Field Recording]
MS I'm curious if you agree with this next thought: noise extending into this digital landscape of just like an overconsumption, over collection of sound and archives and how we sort through them all. How we store them all if we're recording so much. How do we know what is significant? How do we remember them as well? Like I think in western culture we have this tendency, or belief, that we have to record to remember. But really I feel like we're at this stage now that they're just getting lost in the ether. They're clogging up a system and it's this new type of noise. Is that something, as you are creating work, that you are thinking about, and does it change your intention when recording?
HR I think with my practice, when it comes to creating, I've always learnt to create with what I've got. If I go out to record and my recordings aren’t up to my own standards or, you know, there's noise in them, then I can accept that. I don't know what you want to call that. It's not recycling, but it's being sustainable, I guess. In terms of, like your words, what you're saying about …
MS I guess it still reflects your experience of going out and recording, even if the recording is quote-unquote “bad”.
HR Yeah. I also think one of the big things that I learnt early on was to not be attached with what I capture and what I create, and if I lose a file or if I delete a file or a project, that's okay. And it's something that I do a lot when I create sounds and when I create like these procedural sounds, I'll always delete the thing that I've made. Mostly because of what you're saying about that clutter. But also I know how to do the things that I'm trying to do and I think that by having to do it all over again, it reinforces those skills. I don't know that's such a big question that you're asking.
MS Yeah, quite existential as well. It's how do you move forward and still create with this weight?
HR Does noise exist when you can take so much away, when it's so easy to just – is it so easy to just delete everything or is it there forever, like they say?
MS Yeah, who really knows?
HR Who really knows?
MS I like that you talked about just using the recordings that you have because it creates this really nice sense of perspective. And I think sound art, and sound in general, is still quite confusing to a lot of people and quite alienating, but it's such a powerful tool in transporting people. Something that when I listen back to my field recordings always really strikes me and makes me feel like, almost a bit emotional, is like just hearing footsteps, like my own footsteps even, because of that sense of perspective. And when you're working with Dakota, who, you know, has literally a voice in the project and such a strong voice, how are you using sound practices to kind of, not like insert yourself in, but like help shape that piece and carve the perspective that you want the audience to be hearing as well?
HR Yeah, I've thought about this a bit, and I think that I've got a responsibility to acknowledge his storytelling, if that makes sense.
MS Yep, definitely.
HR The last piece that I did, which was a poem story that he had done with Common Ground, and I had gotten just the dialogue was when I started thinking about this. I've always sort of known since I've been working with Dakota that we have a similar experience because we grew up in the same area. We understand the sounds of the bell birds and their significance to that area. He talks about Country and language, and he talks about parts of the South Coast that I know and I think like I've got a responsibility to honour that. So when it comes to inserting myself around that dialogue, that happens through that honouring. So that's why when you listen to some of these pieces, he’ll mention the magpie and then all of a sudden you're surrounded by magpies. Those bird sounds are, the more recent pieces that I've been doing with him, are more foundational to that creative practice because he talks about them a lot. I've been enjoying manipulating and weaving those in, in different ways.
The piece that was at West Space when he was talking about the magpie, which is kind of the last story that he tells, I put this eerie sequence of magpies into this kind of ambient composition that I had a few people say it just sort of, he finishes talking and it lifts you up and takes you off, because that's like the last thing that you hear.
I guess that's how I insert myself, is through sharing that cultural understanding with Dakota, or the people that I collaborate with.
MS Being able to add extra sensory information, so that translation of story is really strong.
HR And then I guess like the other one is, I really like manipulating guitars. Basically a guitar is the first musical thing that I have a learnt and in a lot of the stuff that I do, I've got these like reversed, reverberated, pitched down, slowed down guitar lines that just create the most epic ambiance that you've ever heard. And I spend like days in the studio, just like sitting there with these drone guitars. I think that's just a nod to my own, like my roots.
MS Yeah, but I love that with sound installation, I mean sound in general, like you can be grounding someone quite literally, like you said by bringing in the magpies, and then transform that into this more emotional response tapping into that musical side of humanity. Like that physiological response to it as well.
HR Yeah, I really connected with that last little bit in White Noise. It's Dakota talking around the Ambisonic microphone with his singing clap sticks, I think he called them, and talking in language. And it's just like when you're given the opportunity to sit in that space alone and experience that, I feel like it is definitely one of those experiences that just picks you up and takes you off into your next journey.
Hayden Ryan – [Excerpt]
Exhibited at West Space as part of The place we do not know is the place we are looking for
MS I guess for me, sometimes we allow ourselves to respond differently with different people around. So I think it is really nice that you enforced kind of a private listening experience because you then allowed the audience to maybe have a more vulnerable experience. And I also think communal listening can really add to an experience in a different way by reading everyone else's responses as well.
HR Yeah, I think that like, we're so used to the communal experience that that is the normal experience, to some extent. So like I've had a lot of experience with that and being in those spaces where it's been a communal listening experience and I haven't had a lot of opportunity to think about that because it happens so often and it's so normalised.
But the single listener experience is really interesting because with the very limited people that I've had a conversation about it with, who have listened to the piece, nearly all of them have mentioned or said that they had spent time with the piece, or they enjoyed spending time with the piece as if it was, well it is a human thing, right? You're listening to dialogue but it was interesting to me to hear people say that they had spent time with it. It almost felt as if they had recognised that Dakota, being the only other person in the room, was the only other person in the room. And like going back to those ideas of Ambisonics capturing the spatial being, that's the thing that I wanted to achieve.
The original was a generative piece like it didn't exist on a timeline like this one did. It happened there and then and the soundscape was generative.
MS It would be a very different comment than if someone said I spent time with that piece.
HR Yeah.
MS I always come back to this quote from , which is . And it's so inescapable, and it's really interesting seeing all this like generative technology coming up. And I guess reflecting some thoughts and practices of indigenous cultures where time is more cyclical rather than linear. And it feels like maybe the technology is catching up to those ways of thinking as well. But then also you can take that quote very literally and be like, yeah, you do have to give it the time and the patience and the engagement to fully absorb that sort of work as well. So it's interesting that you've presented it in both ways.
HR Yeah, and it was interesting when I did the panel discussion and someone asked if I had created all of these sounds on the timeline, and they asked me if I had composed everything on Reaper, and I realised that I hadn't, and I had created everything in that same generative environment. The only thing I had done different was recorded it because I had made it on Max MSP which is not linear, I had to convert that soundscape into time. So still, the piece that's presented is temporal. It's 21 minutes, but within like the original piece, it's a snapshot of something that could go on forever.
MS It's like, keep this in your memory and keep listening in this way. Like this is a prototype for listening.
HR Yeah.
The recording that I had taken of Dakota and the one that's presented in the piece isn't cut or sliced. It's everything that happened in the recording session. It includes the mistakes that he made, those nuances and the coughs, the grumbling of his stomach.
MS It’s a full body experience.
HR Should we sit down.
MS Yeah, be in the shade for a bit.
HR Before the session, I told him to not prepare a script. To sit down and talk, and the man can talk. So even within that context, like the idea of a linear narrative doesn't exist. So creating something like a generative piece was, like, best suited for that and it's weird seeing it as like a 21 minute thing.
MS Fixed narrative, yeah.
(2022)
MS We touched on the human voice before, but specifically language and just getting your perspective on how language is cared for and stored and archived – how the spatialisation fits in with that.
HR Yeah, language has been a really difficult thing for me to think about working with. I've spent a little bit of time thinking about it in the spatial context. Within like Dhurga language, which is Yuin language from the South Coast, one of the things that I found really interesting was that the direction in which the wind blows has a name. So there's no fixed name for wind, rather it's the direction from which it blows.
MS It’s even more specific.
HR And that was like the only little bit of spatial, grammatical related bit of information that I found about like my own community.
[Field Recording] Bundanon_Wind from the verandah_100823
MS Just taking a step back, looking at our practice as a whole, what sort of research, sound specific or otherwise, are you looking to or is influencing you at the moment?HR I kind of want this fine line of like, I'm really interested in indigenous understandings of sound and listening, but I'm also interested in like this decolonising and confrontation of like, sound theorists. So at the moment, between these two, it's the confrontation that I'm kind of swimming in at the moment. I guess with things like Ambisonics and like my approaches that I've taken with these projects, it is in opposition of the theory and education that I've been, quote-unquote, “forced” to do through the institution. At the moment, it's been like critiquing Pauline Oliveros and Murray Schafer.
MS Ok, they're big names to takedown.
HR Yeah, and this is something that is like, I guess, taken off from the conference in Spain, where, you know, the paper that I wrote Indigenising Sound Technology is something I feel like not a lot of people in those spaces would want to read or listen to or be involved with and I think it is the same with these theorists.
MS Because they're more just into the technology, or?
HR Yeah, to me that's what it felt like. Hear no evil, see no evil sort of thing.
MS Yes, I mean, that was actually one thing that I couldn't quite fully understand when reading that paper was at one point, I think you mentioned turning the recording device into a cultural object.
HR Yep.
MS All these recording devices, they're all commercial and they're all corporate. What is the push and pull of that relationship as well?
HR There was this really interesting part in I think a Timothy Rice paper – ethnomusicologist – who recited a conversation with a Native American elder who uses the GPS and he's like, ‘why do you use a GPS when you’ve got your, you know, these quote-unquote “native ways” of tracking?’ And he's like, ‘we gravitate towards things that are more efficient.
MS Yep.
HR I guess in this day and age there's no turning back the clock. If we wanted to have our language back and our ceremonies back, we would want to have that but we don't. And when I say we need to indigenise these technologies and they need to be embraced as indigenous technologies, is to claim them as our own.
There are indigenous artists and there are indigenous sound artists, and there are indigenous musicians and the art that they produce isn't art, it's cultural.
MS And it's knowledge.
HR And it's knowledge, and culture and knowledge evolves.
MS Yep, I think that's kind of what we touched on at one point. If it's a fixed recording, we're not letting it change.
HR Yep.
MS And when you were just saying, you know, if we could take it back to the truest form, it's like, well, the truest form has also changed. It’s not necessarily the goal.
HR Yeah, the culture changes. It's inevitable.
MS Yeah, yeah.
[Field Recording] Hayden Ryan – Environment, Seaweed, Bells Beach
MS I guess just more generally, like what do you think the recorded and composed soundscape, or the archived field recording offers to people. Why is it valuable?HR I’m a rebel and I like pushing boundaries in spaces that don't like their boundaries being pushed. And I think the audio technology / innovation / theorist space is still heavily westernised and colonial and I like trying to nudge at that. I do the things that I want to do because I enjoy it and I love it, but there's a part of me that wants to give that knowledge back to the next generation. So it's more of a learning experience for me to become equipped to pass that on.
Monday I start my first teaching class at university in spatial audio design. I've got a few workshops that I want to put on as like accessibility to spatial audio. So all of this sound design and recording and paper writing and archiving is what I'm doing now. I think in the long run, that transmission of knowledge has to happen.
MS We slowly change the technology. We're not going to be able to do it all in our lifetime and I think so often people don't acknowledge that. They think they're going to be the one to make the change, but it's all incremental and so we have to pass that down. In every field, not just ours.
HR Exactly.
MS Well, that's the interview I think
HR That was great. Great walk.
MS Thank you.
[Field Recording] Hayden Ryan – Environment, Seaweed, Bells Beach
Absorbed Terrain was recorded and edited on the lands of the Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung and Gadigal. This always was and always will be Aboriginal Land and I extend that recognition and respect to elders past and present across this entire continent.