Cities and Memory - remixing the world

Bayaka women singing yeyi (polyphonic song) in the forest.

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.

Recorded by Louis Sarno.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

This track is based on the recording of Metimbo of the Aka tribe in the Central African Republic playing the Bubulu (Potbowl). I chose this recording because the rhythmic complexity of the playing was so interesting to me. At first, I was thinking of approaching this exciting recording through many pre-planned ways, but it was proven to be unsuccessful.

So I decided to return to the recording itself and try to experiment as much as I could with the sound. I let the sound design go as wild as possible, and any musical elements should later follow it. The result is a track that is filled with many variations of the recording, achieved through multiple sound design stages.

Every sound that is not a drone, bass, or synth sound is made through the extensive processing of the source material; this means all drums, percussion, textures, and glitch effects came from one origin. The music is wildly different, but I tried to keep the spirit of playfulness in Metimbo's playing intact during the whole track. The title "v4-4" means the fourth revision of the fourth version of this track.

Metimbo playing the bubulu (pot bow) reimagined by 8110118.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Hearing the vocal music of the BaAka for the first time was a powerful, emotional experience for me. This led me to explore some of the other sounds in the Louis Sarno archive, and to his book and film "Song from the Forest", where I learned more about the context and culture behind this music.

In arranging and orchestrating my piece, which blends electronica with neocIassical elements, I wanted to reflect elements of nature. I used calabash, seed based shakers, and deeper, shamanic drums to reflect the forest, with its earthy, natural rhythms. In the original field recording I noticed bright flickers of birdsong around the BaAka voices, and I wanted to leave these environmental sounds in the mix. Later in the piece I introduced higher sounds like strings and voices, a call towards the infinite sky beyond the high forest canopy, and I wove some electronic colours and textures, like tape processed synths and arpeggiators, around the whole.

Listening to the BaAka recordings, I hear a joyful positive energy resonating in the music, but I also feel a poignant melancholy, perhaps a response to my ongoing learning about the fragility of this unique culture, a way of life that harmonises with nature rather than living in opposition to it. Competing interests in the Congo Basin Rainforest continue to threaten the BaAka, and the destruction of their forest habitat continues.

This composition is my reflection on the uniqueness and fragility of this ancient way of life, a way of life that has so much to teach us.

Bayaka women singing yeyi in the forest reimagined by Neil Foster.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of wax cylinder recordings of Zande songs, dances and spoken language made by social anthropologist Edward Evans-Pritchard in South Sudan between 1928 and 1930.

Recorded by Edward Evan Evans-Pritchard.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel recordings of music and spoken language (principally Thulung Rai) made by anthropologist Nicholas Allen in Nepal and India between 1970 and 1981.

Recorded by Nicholas Justin Allen.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

Created in collaboration with Kinnauri filmmaker Himanshu Negi Regesoi, this piece is a meeting of old and new, bringing a sonic archive to life from the Western Himalayas. 

From the Pitt Rivers Museum's sound collection, a field recording of women singing in the early 1980s (recorded in Kinnaur, Himachal Pradesh, India by anthropologist Nicholas Allen) now becomes a portal for a young Indigenous filmmaker to reflect on his homeland/heritage. Through his voice a living thread emerges to celebrate a rich and dynamic culture - both ancient and modern.

The original field recording inspired various textures and loops created to take the listener on a journey from the dusty archives of a museum in Oxford to the vast Himalayas, evoking landscape and opening space for exploring how we deal with the past in the present - to inspire the future. The piece includes the following text from the Royal Geographical Society online exhibition titled “Reimagining the Himalaya through the lens of diasporic indigeneity”: 

“Archives are not just repositories of memory and imagination, they are complex and contested sites of representation deeply shaped by histories of colonial encounters. Whose memories do we elevate, and whose do we obscure? Whose perspectives do we validate to frame our understanding of the world and whose do we suppress? The key to these questions lies in the power to represent ‘truth’. Archives, therefore, are sites of power - the power to explain the world through dominant narratives.” 

https://www.rgs.org/our-collections/stories-from-our-collections/online-exhibitions/reimagining-the-himalaya-through-the-lens-of-diasporic-indigeneity
Footsteps on Wooden Floor.aif by ftpalad -- https://freesound.org/s/119914/ -- License: Creative Commons 0; heavy door open close outside to inside.wav by iggy1345 -- https://freesound.org/s/673236/ -- License: Creative Commons 0; Attic door opening and closing 2 by giddster -- https://freesound.org/s/805637/ -- License: Creative Commons 0

With thanks to Himanshu Negi Regesoi, and to Professor Alan Macfarlane for permission to use an excerpt of his 2001 interview with Nicholas Allen. Produced by Sonic-Soma. Mastered by Felix Davis.

Women singing reimagined by Sonic-Soma.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of cassette tape and digital audio tape recordings of Bayaka music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno mainly in the Central African Republic (and the Republic of Congo) between 1986 and 2009.

Recorded by Louis Sarno.

Copyright Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford.

———
Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

This was one of the more difficult pieces I’ve worked on, although it was enjoyable working through the process. I struggled quite a bit at the beginning, as the field recording has both harmonic & rhythmic structure which varies in tempo quite a bit… so I wasn’t sure how to approach this initially.

After some thought and a fair bit of trial and error, I decided to pick up my guitar (and play the piano) and simply play along with them without overthinking it too much… so the tempo may be a little rough in places! Guitar and piano simply panned out to left/right, adding some bass/cello towards the end. I tried to match my chords with their harmony and I did feel as if I were joining in with them! I noticed the call and response structure in the field recording, so tried to incorporate this as well at either end of the piece.

I wouldn’t say it’s very genre-specific, but it’s more me joining in with them and it’s from the heart. Hopefully it conveys the warmth I felt from listening to the field recording - I hope I have done the Bayang justice in my piece.

Bayang men's songs reimagined by Jaspal Singh Bhogal.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

I ended up listening to this recording a lot in my everyday life, just putting it on and going to work, walking around the city I live in, in idle moments between work. 

I didn’t know an awful lot about Vanuatu, where the recordings were taken by Raymond Clausen in 1962. Having read the Pitt Rivers blog, I thought a lot about how people and societies move on and are changed, sometimes forcibly, by the world they inhabit, and importance of communication, across generations and across the world. Climate change and the threat of rising sea levels presents an existential, direct and profound threat to the lives of people across the global south, particularly islanders. The Vanuatan government has appealed to the world for help via the UN, which with the rise of the right and shattered consensus across the world is becoming increasingly toothless, but hope has to prevail. 

For the spoken text in this piece I used the information about the threat of climate change from the Permanent Mission of the Republic of Vanuatu to the United Nations over a sample of drumming at Wor Tamat, other electronic samples and guitar, with text read by Lizzie Lindsay.

Drumming at Wor Tamat dancing ground reimagined by Dermot Fitzsimons.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds

My chosen sound was a sample of a geedal (bow harp) being played in the forest with accompanying male voices, recorded in Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve. by ethnomusicologist Louis Sarno in 1987. I was drawn to the sample on account of its musicality, not just in terms of the music and vocals, but the lilting patter of conversation and laughter that resonates in these conversational intervals, conveying a joyfulness and inferred novelty and humour at being recorded. At its base level it is so distinctly human and as such I wanted to use as much of the original recording as the instrumental basis for my reimagined soundscape. I began this process by splitting out the voices from the instrumental elements and selected a section of the instrumentation which I stretched and slowed to see what kinds of sounds and rhythms I could split out further and loop.

This first iteration resembled the roar and might of the sea, which is ironic as the Dzanga-Sangha Special Reserve is located in the land locked country of the Central Republic of Africa (CAR); a far cry from any kind of sea. CAR has been almost constantly unstable since its independence from France in 1960, and although the region is rich in diamonds, gold, iron and uranium, it remains one of the world’s poorest populations. It made me think about all of the countries and people who are enduring the horror of conflict, and also of the myths and misinformation about people who are displaced because of a lack of safety. Most people seeking refuge are more likely to migrate to neighbouring countries. It is only a small proportional few who have exhausted all options that are left with no other option than to risk their lives in small boats in one of the most dangerous shipping routes in the world.

The piece takes its title from the national motto in Sango, Zo Kwe Zo, meaning All People Are People. A motto which emphasises the call for equality and shared humanity that transcends ethnic or other differences. Billions of years ago the Earth had just one continent and by the time human life formed in the continent now known to us as Africa, the tectonic plates had shifted to something that resembles how the continents are arranged now. And if you believe in evolution, we are all descended from those early tribes of people who traversed and migrated via long lost land bridges to those early, dispersed, continental forms.

All People Are People in essence is an envisioned journey of these treacherous small boat crossings. The instrumentation has been looped with effects to create a bass undertone to give both that lilting feeling of the waves but also the depth and peril of the sea. This is juxtaposed with an overlaid, pitched-up, choral sample from the original recording to convey hope and also the mythology of singing sirens, symbolising the perilous journey of life. This is further accentuated through field recordings and an additional melody, emulating the sound of an accordion, representing the notion of a lamenting sea shanty and a tribute to those who have lost their lives at sea.

Geedal (bow harp) played in the forest reimagined by Claire Todd.

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Part of the project A Century of Sounds, reimagining 100 sounds covering 100 years from the collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. Explore the full project at citiesandmemory.com/century-sounds