Cities and Memory - remixing the world

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of songs and musical instruments made by journalist Lois Mitchison in Cameroon during 1958.

Recorded by Sonja Lois Mitchison.

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

Geedal (bow harp) played in the forest with male voices accompanying.

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

From the sound collections of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford, being from a large collection of reel-to-reel tape recordings of music and soundscapes made by ethnomusicologist Raymond Clausen mainly on the island of Malekula (Malampa Province) in Vanuatu between 1960 and 1979.

Recorded by Raymond Ernst Clausen.

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

"To See and Remember" is a composition incorporating elements from a 1965 expedition field recording from the Chocó Department, in Colombia, by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith, who were then fellow students at the University of Cambridge. The recording that I selected, made on 5-inch reel tape, captures the sounds of the local Emberá people playing music with flute, drums and other percussive instruments. 

During my research, I discovered a 100-page diary kept by the field recordists, now preserved in the archives of the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Reading the manuscript, it became clear that Ambache and Saumarez Smith were deeply committed to presenting the sounds of a culture from an isolated part of the world – as they wrote in their diary, “we wanted to be put entirely in their hands.”

While studying the manuscript – often with the field recording playing on loop – I realised that some passages of text could work well as spoken-word accompaniment to the composition I had already begun creating. It also became apparent that I was approaching the work from the point of view of the field recordists themselves, rather than focusing solely on the environment depicted in the material, as I would normally. I was, in a sense, trying to hear and see the world as they did.

My compositional process involved listening repeatedly to the original field recording in my audio production software, allowing its textures and rhythms to wash over me and guide my decisions. I cut up and rearranged sections of the recording and manipulated them around a drum loop, often stretching the tempo to slow down the percussive strikes and the trill of flute, creating drone-like reverberations. I then gradually added synthesisers, electric guitar and bass guitar, layering various modulation, delay and reverb effects. The final stage involved recording myself reading extracts from the diary, giving voice to the field recordists’ written words alongside the “abundant music” of the Emberá people.

Chocó flute and drum music with rattle reimagined by Jase Warner.

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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 originally chose the field recording simply because I enjoyed the melody. The women sang the same melodic phrase over and over with slight changes. I felt like they were telling a story but, as I don’t speak the language, I had to look elsewhere for inspiration. 

I researched the mythology and folklore of Himachal Pradesh’s remote valleys and discovered a common ghostly tale. If you are out walking in the pine forest and you hear your name being whispered it could be wandering soul or "Bhoot" enticing you to join them. It mimics the voice of a loved one to tempt you from the path so don’t look back or you could be doomed.

The original melody was in quite a complex time signature so I used short samples of the voices and played them in common time. I recreated the original melody and variations of it in different instruments which would be common to the area. I wanted the voices to sound as though they were calling from within the trees and echoing through the valley to tempt you to follow. I used Ableton Live.

Women singing with flute reimagined by Lynn Findlay.

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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 listened to the first 20 seconds of the track, heard the hummed murmur of a Ba'aka voice and thought, "I can work with that." It wasn’t until the next day that I heard the engaging, immersive, gently rocking polyphony that the murmur develops into. I learned that the Ba'aka musical style is over 30,000 years old, older than any continuous musical heritage. UNESCO describes Ba'aka music as a "masterpiece of the oral and intangible heritage of humanity".

For me, the beautifully simple, deeply resonant recording needed to be front and centre - ancient polyphony, charming music borne of and a reflection on the spiritual forest the Ba'aka inhabit, now under multiplied threat. Deforestation, civil war - commercial colonialism is eating away at their home and aural heritage, even conservation efforts. Intangible archaeology is being lost. 

What will matter is what we do with these sounds. It is hoped that by bringing the recording into another musical world, I can in some small way help connect with their heritage as well as amplify a shared future.
 
A Ba'aka voice can be heard at the start: “Better record that.” 

Bayaka voices in the forest at dawn reimagined by David Lol Perry.

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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.

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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 tape recordings of Chocó music and soundscapes made by students Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith in Colombia in 1965.

Recorded by Jonathan Ambache and Richard Saumarez Smith.

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

The field recording I chose is of a gentleman named Thomas Penniman performing an early 20th-century work song about weaving from the Gower Peninsula. It's a strange, compelling and mysterious recording, made in the winter of 1974. There's a repeated refrain, "Mrs Tanner has six sons/And they all sang like thrushes as they worked at the loom", which I loved. But then the song becomes quite angry because the sons have only been given half a herring for breakfast. It's not enough! Mr Penniman beats his fist, and it sounds like both a drum and a piece of wooden machinery thumping. The "song" in this version isn't musical as such, it's somewhere between a passionate poetry reading, an a cappella performance, and, as it goes on, almost like mouth music. Mr Penniman starts out in a determined, lucid way, but seems to lose the thread of the song as he goes on. 

I pulled at the threads of the recording's story and made discoveries. Thomas Penniman was an American anthropologist, and curator at the Pitt Rivers between 1939-63. The museum website says: "Penniman saw the Museum as aiming, 'to show the origin, development, geographical distribution and variation of the principal arts and industries of mankind from the earliest times to the age of mass production". He was responsible for the organisation of the card catalogue system, which, I suppose, is one reason why information about these field recordings, and the recordings themselves, are easily available to us online today. I liked the sense of a history of technology for this artefact. 

The song references the Tanner family of weavers, the most famous of which was the Welsh traditional singer Phil Tanner (1862-1950), known as the Gower Nightingale. He performed and remembered - and in doing so transmitted into the future - a body of folk songs in English, using the Gower dialect. They survive through him. His life story conjures up a lost world of Welsh weaving, of family "factories" and mills, and of singing and dancing (I sing, badly, a line from the shearing song "Rosebuds in June"). The Welsh wool industry peaked around the time the song was born, and declined after the early 20th century. The song suggests this industry was no idyll; hard, repetitive labour and poverty is suggested through its refrains and rhythms. 

The Tanner family has six sons, but they also had a daughter, yet she is not included in the song. Why not, and why was she unsung?

I was intrigued by Thomas Penniman and Phil Tanner, and how their personal and other histories were entwined by song and work, and in this specific song as it has come to me. What was I responding to, and how, and why? I liked the way the song carries a memory of the lost world of that industry and time, and I was compelled by how Mr Penniman, who must have heard the song directly from Phil Tanner, starts out so confidently, determined to conjure the song, but loses his way - he was an elderly man by the time of the recording - and ends in a kind of confusion, unable to remember how to finish it. There seemed something moving in all this about how singers and songs are woven on the loom of time, and how the means of that remembering, or passing forward, of the song has evolved through the technologies of the century to our time of the lossless WAV format - which is how we're hearing our pieces. But there are also loose threads, tangles, confusions, snags, knots, widows and losses. 

I'm a poet, not a musician, so my piece is a poem. It's lo-fi in terms of how I was able to edit together the original field recording and my own text. You can probably hear how hand-made it is, despite the tech. But I like that.

There's a tiny moment at the end of the recording when Mr Penniman asks for help to stop the recording, which I found haunting - the strange moment after the song has ended, and we just hear the scratchy particles of lost time. So, I have kept it in.

Weaving song from the Gower Peninsula reimagined by Nick Drake.

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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