Being there: meditations on listening, recording and composing

This paper will address how listening may activate a sense of engagement with the past. Do past events leave sonic traces? If so - how can we hear and interpret them? What part does the “mind’s ear” or the listening imagination play in this interpretation? Can recording and recorded sound capture something of the embodied listening experience? Can the specific qualities of sound transcend them being removed from their context? How can the composer use sounds in order to intersect with the memories and experiences of the listener? In this short paper I shall attempt to address some of these questions with reference to my attempts to both explore and communicate something about history and memory related to the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, through the medium of composed sound using a mixture of monologues, field recordings and interviews collected during a number of trips to the Outer Hebrides as well as material from existing oral history archives. In the presentation I shall both talk and play examples of recorded and composed sound from “On the Machair” (http://www.gruenrekorder.de/?page_id=174) and “Tweed” part of “The Hebrides Suite”