Nowhere Landscape, for Clarinets, Trombones, Percussion, Violins, and Electronics and “The Map and the Territory: Documenting David Dunn’s Sky Drift”

1. nowhere landscape, for clarinets, trombones, percussion, violins, and electronics

nowhere landscape is an eighty-minute work for nine performers, composed of acoustic and electronic sounds. Its fifteen movements invoke a variety of listening strategies, using slow change, stasis, layering, coincidence, and silence to draw attention to the sonic effects of the environment—inside the concert hall as well as the world outside of it. The work incorporates a unique stage set-up: the audience sits in close proximity to the instruments, facing in one of four different directions, while the musicians play from a number of constantly-shifting locations, including in front of, next to, and behind the audience.

Much of nowhere landscape’s material is derived from a collection of field recordings

made by the composer during a road trip from Springfield, MA to Douglas, WY along US- 20, a cross-country route made effectively obsolete by the completion of I-90 in the mid- 20th century. In an homage to artist Ed Ruscha’s 1963 book Twentysix Gasoline Stations, the composer made twenty-six recordings at gas stations along US-20. Many of the movements of nowhere landscape examine the musical potential of these captured soundscapes: familiar and anonymous, yet filled with poignancy and poetic possibility.

2. “The Map and the Territory: Documenting David Dunn’s Sky Drift”

In 1977, David Dunn recruited twenty-six musicians to play his work Sky Drift in the

Anza-Borrego Desert in Southern California. This outdoor performance was documented with photos and recorded with four stationary microphones to tape. A year later, Dunn presented the work in New York City as a “performance/documentation,” playing back the audio recording and projecting slides. In this paper I examine the consequences of this kind of act: what does it mean for a recording of an outdoor work to be shared at an indoor concert event? Can such a complex and interactive experience be successfully flattened into some kind of re-playable documentation? What can a recording capture and what must it exclude?

This paper engages with these questions as they relate to David Dunn’s Sky Drift and to similar works by Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Luther Adams. These case-studies demonstrate different solutions to the difficulty of documenting outdoor performances. Because this music is often heard from a variety of equally-valid perspectives—and because any single microphone only captures sound from one of these perspectives—the physical set-up of these kind of pieces complicate what it means to even “hear the music” at all. To this end, I discuss issues around the “work itself” and “aura” as well as “transparency” and “liveness” in recorded sound, bringing in thoughts and ideas from Walter Benjamin, Howard Becker, Joshua Glasgow, and others. In addition, the artist Robert Irwin and the composer Barry Truax have written about the conceptual distinctions between “the work” and “not- the-work”; these distinctions are complicated by documentation and recording. Without the context, the being-there, the music is stripped of much of its ability to communicate meaning.

Behavioral Ecology of the Western Atlantic Short-finned Pilot Whale (Globicephala macrorhynchus)

Social structure is a key determinant of population biology and is central to the way animals exploit their environment. The risk of predation is often invoked as an important factor influencing the evolution of social structure in cetaceans and other mammals, but little direct information is available about how cetaceans actually respond to predators or other perceived threats. The playback of sounds to an animal is a powerful tool for assessing behavioral responses to predators, but quantifying behavioral responses to playback experiments requires baseline knowledge of normal behavioral patterns and variation. The central goal of my dissertation is to describe baseline foraging behavior for the western Atlantic short-finnned pilot whales (Globicephala macrohynchus) and examine the role of social organization in their response to predators. To accomplish this I used multi-sensor digital acoustic tags (DTAGs), satellite-linked time-depth recorders (SLTDR), and playback experiments to study foraging behavior and behavioral response to predators in pilot whales. Fine scale foraging strategies and population level patterns were identified by estimating the body size and examining the location and movement around feeding events using data collected with DTAGs deployed on 40 pilot whales in summers of 2008-2014 off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina. Pilot whales were found to forage throughout the water column and performed feeding buzzes at depths ranging from 29-1176 meters. The results indicated potential habitat segregation in foraging depth in short-finned pilot whales with larger individuals foraging on average at deeper depths. Calculated aerobic dive limit for large adult males was approximately 6 minutes longer than that of females and likely facilitated the difference in foraging depth. Furthermore, the buzz frequency and speed around feeding attempts indicate this population pilot whales are likely targeting multiple small prey items. Using these results, I built decision trees to inform foraging dive classification in coarse, long-term dive data collected with SLTDRs deployed on 6 pilot whales in the summers of 2014 and 2015 in the same area off the coast of North Carolina. I used these long term foraging records to compare diurnal foraging rates and depths, as well as classify bouts with a maximum likelihood method, and evaluate behavioral aerobic dive limits (ADLB) through examination of dive durations and inter-dive intervals. Dive duration was the best predictor of foraging, with dives >400.6 seconds classified as foraging, and a 96% classification accuracy. There were no diurnal patterns in foraging depth or rates and average duration of bouts was 2.94 hours with maximum bout durations lasting up to 14 hours. The results indicated that pilot whales forage in relatively long bouts and the ADLB indicate that pilot whales rarely, if ever exceed their aerobic limits. To evaluate the response to predators I used controlled playback experiments to examine the behavioral responses of 10 of the tagged short-finned pilot whales off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina and 4 Risso’s dolphins (Grampus griseus) off Southern California to the calls of mammal-eating killer whales (MEK). Both species responded to a subset of MEK calls with increased movement, swim speed and increased cohesion of the focal groups, but the two species exhibited different directional movement and vocal responses. Pilot whales increased their call rate and approached the sound source, but Risso’s dolphins exhibited no change in their vocal behavior and moved in a rapid, directed manner away from the source. Thus, at least to a sub-set of mammal-eating killer whale calls, these two study species reacted in a manner that is consistent with their patterns of social organization. Pilot whales, which live in relatively permanent groups bound by strong social bonds, responded in a manner that built on their high levels of social cohesion. In contrast, Risso’s dolphins exhibited an exaggerated flight response and moved rapidly away from the sound source. The fact that both species responded strongly to a select number of MEK calls, suggests that structural features of signals play critical contextual roles in the probability of response to potential threats in odontocete cetaceans.