Residencies
Field Recordist & Soundscape Designer at Wadhurst Park
July 2024 - Sep 2024
Links
Two month internship/ residency at Wadhurst Park, an 850 acre biodiverse ecological restoration site located within the High Weald Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, Sussex. The estate is owned by science historian and philanthropist Lisbet Rausing, co-founder of Arcadia, one of the UK's largest philanthropic foundations.
During my time at Wadhurst, I cultivated a rigorous field recording practice, creating a comprehensive archive of high quality recordings of the park’s geophony and biophony to support the conservation team. This now serves as both a documentary and pedagogical resource. Working closely with ecologists, gardeners, and rangers, I produced and composed a 40 minute soundscape that weaves together field recordings from the park’s diverse habitats, interviews with staff and local communities, and original music composition. This composition is now featured on the park’s website.
At the culmination of this internship, I delivered a detailed written report outlining outlining my methodologies, findings, and evaluations, which I presented to a panel of environmental experts, the Rausing family, and company stakeholders at Arcadia’s headquarters in London. This presentation highlighted the importance of sound as a powerful tool for ecological inquiry.
Projects
Audio Paper - Tiny Voices: Acoustemology as Collective Self-Realisation
Link/ Excerpt
An audio paper produced and narrated by myself, exploring the intersection of Deep Ecology and animal communication/ perception. Largely inspired by the books ‘Sounds, Wild and Broken’ (Haskell, 2022) and ‘The Ecology of Wisdom’ (Naess, 2016), it proposes deeper engagement with our environment as the basis for a an alternative mode of self-identification. By exploring more-than-human aesthetics and narratives this audio paper formulates a more sustainable method of creating and maintaining environmental motivation, citing conception over ethics as the primary concern in changing the way we navigate the Anthropocene.
London Wetland Centre Soundscape Composition - Black Marsh Sun
Links/ Excerpt
As part of a collaboration between the Universidad Austral, Valdivia, Chile, and the University of Arts London, a trip to the WWT London Wetlands Centre was organised by lecturer and programme director, Adam Stanovic. All students and staff who partook were required to take a number of field recordings, creating an archive from which they were able to draw from, in order to create individual, original compositions of the wetlands. This was based on the Universidad Austral’s SoundLapse project, where a five-minute recording was made, every hour for 365 days, at five different locations throughout the wetlands around Valdivia: https://soundlapse.net/. Members were then given the opportunity to publish their productions on German record label for field recording, soundscapes and sound art, Gruenrekorder, compiling all works into a comprehensive album.
As part of this project I created a 4 minute soundscape composition, titled ‘Black Sun’, utilising both instrumentation and field recordings taken at the WWT London Wetland Centre.
Programme Note
“The mechanical thrum of planes overhead the London Wetland Centre pulls an all encompassing veil of sound over its avian inhabitants. Every trill, tweet, and warble is accompanied by the prolonged roars, and almost perpetual rumble of noise pollution. Though these reservoir-transformed wetlands symbolise human solidarity against capitalist destruction, a tension remains palpable. Sitting in the hide, looking out over its manufactured vastness, the sonic landscape tells a different story. Plane tones collide, and compound, cutting through the surface of the water, reverberating into the recesses of its aquatic ecosystems; a sonic eclipse. In this mythopoetic retelling we imagine a world slowly submerged in darkness. Birds fly blind. Fish swim deaf. The layered drones of passing planes build amidst dense orchestration, masking presence and erasing nuance. The wetlands become a stage for the collective shadow of humanity, and invites the listener to ponder on the shadows they too cast.”
Audio Visual Composition - Transformations
Link
Specifications
- 4k mixed media film, (Super 8, digital camcorder)
- 24 bit, 48k Sound file (Dolby Atmos binaural render)
- Duration: 3 minutes 16 seconds
Programme Note
Experimental filmmaker and composer Daniel Pakdel’s numinous encounters with a chattering of Jackdaws manifests audio-visually through visceral imagery and immersive soundscape composition. In this psycho-ethological meditation, field recordings and super 8 footage become the bases of poetic inquiry, mapping self-transformation in the face of the more-than-human world. By tracing these birds’ murmurations during the penumbra of twilight, through winter into spring - at times ears perked to quiet conversations, other times surrendering to deafening chorus - Daniel questions the boundaries between sound and selfhood. Through this, jackdaws are reframed as messengers in this mythology recreated. Rather than their folkloric associations with thievery and death, they become archetypes of the collective shadow, surpassing their biological identity by becoming mirrors of the human psyche.
In recreating the primacy of his experience, we are drawn into flight through a mirage of images shaped by improvisatory filmmaking. The camera itself becomes a paintbrush of memories, reverent and liminal, revealing the emotional undercurrents of perception. These seemingly invisible forms, that clothe the ear, entrance us into a dreamlike state, within which the subconscious recalls, and speaks to us through, the ambiguity of the sensuous.
Tolling bells, signalling twilight and the onset of encounter, merge with manipulated jackdaw voices buried amidst instrumentation. Birdsong and violin entwine in an ongoing tension of continuous becoming… until a moment of transformative resonance, where boundaries dissolve, and sound, self and jackdaw become indistinguishable from one another.
“In allowing the Jackdaws to become key players in our conception of self, a portal opens to the unconscious. Entering into this relationship then is an act of archetypal activism; a reclamation of one's agency that emerges through some qualitative resonance with the other.”
Workshops
Pembroke Academy of Music (PAM) Sound Arts and Music Technology Workshop
March 2025
Two back-to-back 30 minute workshops delivered to a cohort of 50 Children at the Pembroke Academy of Music, London. The aim of this workshop was to introduce the children to environmental sound arts. This was delivered through a brief presentation of soundscape studies, group vocal/ somatic activities, and an interactive exercise using various music technologies.
Midi controllers were mapped to various parameters in Ableton Live and Launchpads were loaded with samples of instruments, animal sound-making, and environmental field recordings. Using these, students were encouraged to collaboratively recreate soundscapes prompted by visual cues of different habitats, encouraging teamwork and creative expression.