The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek

cello, percussion, and fixed media

60' in seven extractable movements and two interludes

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2024​

written for New Morse Code

funded by the 2023-24 DePauw University Fisher Fellowship

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The Listening Year at Big Walnut Creek is a sound art project that explores the changing sonic ecology of a place. 

 

Every week from July 2022-June 2023, I made a field recording at Big Walnut Creek in Putnam County, Indiana. I (and sometimes, a co- or guest recordist) went to the site, explored the sounds present there that day, decided where and how to position the recorder and set levels given the sounds and conditions, and pressed record. I gave a brief verbal introduction, then listened for a minimum of five minutes before saying goodbye and ending the recording. 

 

Throughout and after the recording year, I consulted with scientists, environmentalists, local residents, colleagues in the arts, and student assistants to interpret the audio, facilitating an interdisciplinary, intergenerational creative ecology in conversation with the ecology of the creek. I created an hour-long musical work whose form, content, sound material, and media emerged from that conversation. This creative phase of the project was awarded the 2023-24 Fisher Fellowship from DePauw University. 

Big Walnut Creek forms the East boundary of the Nature Park at DePauw University. It is a small rural waterway, but it is subject to numerous human impacts on its ecology that have much broader environmental implications. By undertaking this listening and recording practice for a year, and bringing that practice into open-ended conversation with many forms of expertise about the creek and its watershed, as well as aesthetic and musical approaches to its sonic ecology, I hoped to demonstrate the value of listening attentively to place as part of the solution to human environmental destruction.

 

Accordingly, the piece’s form and instrumental parts reflect the sounds, morphology and ecology of the creek and its adjacent riparian and agricultural zones. At the same time, the piece bears witness to the transformative experience of engaging in this year-long environmental listening practice.