from Jesse’s PhD exegesis:

In the Dreamtime, in search of his two wives, Ngurunderi travelled down the Murray River which at that time was only a small stream. A giant Murray cod, Pondi, swam ahead and with each swish of its mighty tail widened the stream. Ngurunderi, in pursuit, tried to spear the cod from his canoe. Lenteilin, Long Island, near Murray Bridge, represents one of the spears which missed (Bell 1998, p. 91).

A significant part of Ngarrindjeri culture, Long Island is a 1.8km long island bisecting the Murray River at Murray Bridge. In recent decades, the Rural City of Murray Bridge Council has placed legislative restrictions around watercraft navigation in the Island’s channels. Whereas the western side is open to motorised watercraft, the eastern side prohibits this activity, preserving a waterfowl refuge.

With the advent of Soundscape Ecology and Ecoacoustic research of aquatic soundscapes, numerous studies have identified impacts of anthropogenic boat noise on aquatic species (Chao, Xinguo & Guangxu 2015; Filiciotto & Buscaino 2017). Powered vessels occupy broadband frequency ranges and operate at very loud volumes, whereas aquatic species living in rivers and oceans (especially cetaceans) have evolved to communicate and hear in narrowband frequency ranges and can only call at volumes relative to their physiology. Because of this, these animals find it increasingly difficult to communicate effectively while being masked by loud watercraft noise and may even sustain hearing damage.

Long Island, with its existing legislative controls providing both terrestrial and aquatic soundscapes with and without motorboat activity, was an opportune site to explore these relationships. Considering the impact of motorboat noise on terrestrial and aquatic environments in a creative context, I looked to heighten audience sensitivity to non- terrestrial soundscapes, and consider less impactful alternatives to engagement with and enjoyment of these environments.

Formally, a space-by-space listening experience would progress, with the listener beginning in the non-motorised soundscapes, first above water (Terrestrial Non- Motorised), then submerging below (Aquatic Non-Motorised). With the listener still immersed, boat activity is gradually introduced and becomes overwhelming (Aquatic Motorised), after which the listener reemerges to the open air with boat activity continuing (Terrestrial Motorised).

In the early stages of development, a Pierrot ensemble (piano, flute, clarinet, violin and violoncello) was considered, and venues with vertical elements (staircases and landings) were investigated to represent the vertical spatial relationships of the river, island floor and treetop canopy. Because of potential staging difficulties, these ambitious plans were rethought, and a standard stage environment was chosen, the ensemble being scaled back to strings and piano (four-hands).


My initial research involved collation of various records from different government and cultural institutions, including survey maps of Long Island from the Rural City of Murray Bridge Council, resources form the Department of Environment and Water (DEW), consultation with the local Historical Society and long-time neighbours (pertaining to historic and current uses of the island). As I learned, following European settlement of the area, the island became a popular picnic spot in the early 20th century, and acted as a training location for US army engineers during World War II, where pontoons were temporarily built as backups for bridge access in the event that the existing (Murray) bridge was bombed). Following damage to recreational infrastructure in the famous 1956 floods, the island was abandoned. This allowed willows, first introduced as distance markers along the river in the 1800s, to spread over the island alongside well-established eucalypts, making it generally inaccessible.

This background research was followed by multiple recording trips between April 2016 - April 2017, when recordings were made on both sides of the islands with a Zoom H6 portable recorder. Above water, X-Y microphone capsules were used, recording on a small beach on the eastern side, and the jetty adjacent to the western channel’s boat ramp. Below water, a pair of H1-A Aquarian Audio hydrophones provided a basic stereo image, recording on the eastern side from a kayak in the middle of the river, and on the western side from the aforementioned jetty.


Preparation and Composition

With challenges in conveying non-human experience to a human audience, I opted to use aesthetic displeasure as a mediating communication tool, positioning the ambient soundscape against introduced anthropogenic noise. By keeping the ‘non-motorised’ soundscape field recordings and instrumental activity dynamics at a relatively low amplitude throughout the work (akin to real-world circumstances), the intervention of loud motorboat activity creates a stark contrast by masking the ambient acoustic environment.

Electronics

With only field recordings to work with initially, the electronic component was developed first. Deciding on a stereo setup, I sampled and organised the field recordings according to the earlier formal plans in Ableton Live 9’s Arrangement View, allotting each section (terrestrial non-motorised, aquatic non-motorised, aquatic motorised and terrestrial motorised) 3 minutes and 45 seconds, with a total duration of 15 minutes. For the latter ‘motorised’ half of the work, recordings of motorboats both under and above water were overlaid, effectively masking the background ambient activity. Simple filtering and reverberation were used to reinforce the acoustic characteristics of each medium, air and water.

Instrumentation

For the instrumentation, I focussed both transcribing the biophonic and geophonic aspects of the soundscape.

Given that the Mobilong site is only a few kilometres from Long Island, I decided to reuse the string bird call transcriptions made for Mobilong, combining them in a single score for strings, played only during the terrestrial soundscape activity.
The piano’s material was generated through a multi-stage analysis and transformation of the electronic component’s field recordings. Initially, the recordings were divided up into 15-second samples and analysed spectrally in SPEAR. The spectral information thus obtained was then subjected to frequency filtering (between 30Hz to 4200Hz to reduce frequency information to the keyboard range) and amplitudinal filtering (above -45dB for terrestrial, -35dB for aquatic soundscape), leaving only most prominent pitch material. Exported from SPEAR in the .SDIF file format, the data was then imported into the MaxScore Environment, Macaque (Didkovsky & Hajdu 2008) and rendered as MIDI data, which was then transferred to Sibelius 7 to be developed into a performable score. Further editing of pitch material (rounding 1⁄4 tones to the nearest semitone), phrasing (interpreting spectral partial trajectories as contrapuntal lines), rhythms (quantising) and fingering (arranging for four hands, Fig. 7) sculpted the piano part into an impressionistic-cum-spectralist commentary on the soundscape. Interestingly, the rhythmic quantisation of the piano material produces a shifting relationship between the pianists and the field recordings. Guided only by time cues 15 seconds apart, the pianists play the developed material more or less rubato between time, such that the material and recordings made be played coincidentally (reinforcing), or before (foreshadowing) or after (echoing) one another, creating dynamic and ever- changing relationships between live performance and (pre-recorded) environment.

Initially, it was intended that both strings and piano would be played throughout the work. However, the lack of recordings of soniferous aquatic species in the Murray River meant that the strings were chosen to play exclusively in the terrestrial soundscape sections. Then, after consultation with pianist Gabriella Smart, the piano material was scaled back only to be played in the aquatic soundscape section, as it was felt that piano throughout the entire work would become aurally taxing. This isolation of instrumental roles ended up creating clarity and more specific aural identities for the contrasting aquatic and terrestrial soundscapes.

Realisation

Like Mobilong, Long Island resulted in multiple performance formats. While scored for live performers and electronics, the instrumental activity can be replicated through electronic playback, the strings using the Density Patch (as used in Mobilong), and the piano using MIDI playback within the Ableton session.

An alternate version of the work, for electronics and piano four-hands, was workshopped by Daniel Thorpe and Gabriella Smart at Beaumont House on February 23 2018, as part of Soundstream Collective’s Blue Touch series

A shortened acousmatic version of the work was developed for the Landscape Music concert at Michigan Tech University on 10 December 2017. A full duration acousmatic version was also developed and played as part of Immersed: A Concert of New Surround Sound Works at the University of Adelaide on 19 May 2018 and at the Murray Bridge Town Hall on 3 June 2018.

Reflection

By contrast to the real-time, surround sound approach of Mobilong, Long Island presents a temporally and spatially abstracted work. Responding to landscape topology and human impact (both cultural and sociopolitical), the work aims not an accurate spatiotemporal representation of Long Island, but rather a general cross-comparison of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems that comments on the impact of anthropogenic noise in these environments.

Long Island extends the exploration of performative agency in Mobilong to the domain of the linear score. While the string part continues to use modular scoring and stochastics, the piano part encourages interaction and negotiation between the pianists as it moves between points of synchronisation and rhythmic freedom, and also with the electronically- rendered aquatic field recordings from which they are derived.

These interactions also extend to the roles that the acoustic instrumentation and electroacoustic media take, with the strings as biophony, the piano as geophony, and the electronics as anthropophony (as motorboat recordings). During the latter half of the piece, these elements are juxtaposed through the acoustic masking of the instrumental activity by the electronic boat samples. Aiming at aesthetic displeasure through deliberately obscuring instrumental activity (generally a taboo in Western orchestrational technique), this approach allows the audience to comprehend the various agencies these sound represents, and extrapolate on non-human experiences in motorboat-occupied waterways.

At first, this positioning of the ‘Natural’ biophony and geophony against the ‘human’ anthropophony may appear to apotheosise and reinforce the Romantic divide between human and non-humans, as critiqued in Morton’s Dark Ecology concept. However, the creative representation of biophony and geophony through human instrumental performance provides a mode of identifying and reconnecting with non-humans within the Long Island ecosystem, and more broadly aquatic ecosystems. In turn, this encourages listeners, performers and audience alike to consider how they relate with aquatic beings and environments in the real world.