Landscape Generated Composition By Sophie Cooper

Welcome to a deep dive into composition methods that I, Sophie Cooper, have been developing over the past few years through my collaboration with Babs Smith. I first stumbled on the idea of Landscape Generated Composition during my research into our first Immersive Reservoirs project, Immersive Watergrove. I tasked myself with recording environmental sounds around Watergrove Reservoir and set up my recording equipment in several locations to immerse myself in the space through sound. While there, I couldn’t help but feel quite self-conscious. I started to worry about how I must look to dog walkers and passers-by sitting alone on a bench for long periods of time, wearing headphones and staring into space. I’ve often cursed the durational mode of field recording because I’ve found it hard to stay focused in publicly positioned scenarios when I know people can observe what I am doing. To counter this, I found myself drawing in my notebook which immediately felt like a more acceptable activity if someone noticed what I was doing. What emerged from those drawings of the landscape is what I’m now referring to as Landscape Generated Composition.A look into composition methods used to create the soundtrack to Immersive Greenbooth.

As I drew the landscape in front of me and listened to the sounds of the place I started to think of the images as scores for music. The marks I was making on the page, based on positions of trees on the horizon or leaves in a nearby tree, slowly started to form short lines of music which ended up being incredibly helpful jumping off points for sound design later in the studio. In the recording process I translated the drawings into notation and based most of the melodies that appeared in the final works on this idea.

https://sophiecooper.bandcamp.com/album/immersive-watergrove

At Greenbooth Reservoir I wanted to expand on this idea and compose scores that other soloists could perform being lucky enough to have access to professional artists through my MA course at Huddersfield University. Out of the six artworks we have produced for Immersive Greenbooth, five of the soundtracks were created using different takes on the Landscape Generated Composition notion and I’ll go into some detail about two of them now.

Currents, performed by Marco Fusi on viola d’amore

Currents is probably the most literal approach I took to the concept. It started with me taking panoramic photographs of my favourite part of the reservoir site, Naden Upper Reservoir, which is the oldest and highest part of the structure. Around this part of the site are several wind turbines which are audible on a clear day creating a gentle hum in the air which I pitched at being approximately an F on my keyboard phone app. I recorded the sound here for some time and this formed a big part of the final work. Back in the studio, I positioned the photographs into a timeline of four parts then traced over the top of the images with pen and ink onto tracing paper. I interpreted the graphics at this point as a piece for two instrumental parts and so imagined this work as a duo between the viola d’amore and my instrument, the trombone. The graphics were later printed up as a transparency that can be placed over the photographs for more musical information.

The transparency:

AD: Four bands of images set out like a musical score. The images consist of clusters of circles at the top, followed by arrows that point in different directions. The last line indicates long arrows that all eventually point down.

The photographs:

AD: 4 panoramic images of landscapes. The landscapes consist of rolling hills, big open blue skies, bodies of water and some pathways and dry-stone walls in the foreground. There are black inked lines drawn over some of the images.

In the bottom photograph you can see where I’ve taken the positions of the wind turbines on the landscape and positioned them onto an alto stave for the viola d’amore to play. The notation is purposely loose partly because I knew that Marco Fusi would add his incredible improvisational skills to the work and that I would be doing a lot of post-production in the studio so there was no need to be exact.

I also wrote out some instructions for the performers to work with alongside an edited version of the original field recording obtained at the site. The field recording starts out as the raw sound but gradually you start to hear partials of an F chord coming through to the foreground via EQ techniques.

Instructions:

Naden Upper Reservoir

Sophie Cooper

Instrumentation:

• Viola d’amore

• Trombone

• Field recording, just under ten mins long.

• Link to field recording: https://on.soundcloud.com/J8FUwotUyXPbnd1NA

Notes:

• Viola d’amore can be tuned to anything that works with the field recording pitches. Skip to the end of the recording to hear the final EQed pitches for the best reference.

• There are four parts to this piece, each about 2 mins, 30 seconds long. Each part is

represented by one line of graphic score each, read top to bottom and from left to right for the timeline.

• Start with the acetate score first (labelled, Open First) but use the photography version

(labelled, Open Second) for more inspiration and note suggestions if needed.

• To start, hit play on the recording which will be present throughout.

• All timings below to be observed but are a rough estimate.

• Looking for an organic vibe that’s complimentary to the field recording, this applies to the

dynamics as well.

Part 1: (Viola d’amore solo)

0.00 – 0.40 Start with a consonant chord of three notes, play with a circular bowing action.

0.40 – 1.20 Play low notes of the chord, plucked staccato style. Clustered.

1.20 – 1.50 As above but add higher notes in.

1.50 – 2.30 Gestural movements that gradually get more expressive

Part 2: (Viola d’amore solo)

2.30 – 3.20 Similar to start but with fourth note, circular bowing action.

3.20 – 3.40 Follow gestural pattern across instrument

3.40 – 4.30 Rising note patterns, repeated at will on a loop.

4.30 – 5.00 Keep repeating notes but let them “fall” towards the end of each phrase

Part 3: (Viola d’amore and Trombone)

Note, at this point, the field recording sounds a lot more intense and pitched than at the start. Useful to let this shine through a bit.

Timings freer than before but the section is still around 2 mins 30 secs long.

Viola d’amore plays higher line. Observe pause signs. In general, follow the curve and play in

harmony with the recording. Ends this part with a trailing off.

Trombone plays lower line. Follow the curve in terms of pitch and dynamics.

Part 4: (Viola d’amore and Trombone)

Trombone starts playing pitched lower end notes that fade out.

Viola’d’amore plays curve like it’s flying on the wind. Viola d’amore has final say.

During the composition and recording process of this piece, I was having discussions with Babs Smith about her visuals and how they would work together with the sound. We struck upon the theme of energy generation due to its obvious prevalence at the site early on in the research. You can see huge wind turbines at one end and electricity pylons at the other. Babs’ work enters the imagined internals of one of the turbines and we travel through the structure at a speed dictated by intense layered strings, a short cut from the final recording. Together we landed on the title of ‘Currents’ for this work which we felt captures the essence of movement and energy production at the site.

Cygnus, performed by Tom Hawkins on cello.

Cygnus began by a visit to Greenbooth Reservoir to meet with site manager, Clare Heathcote. Clare was able to grant Babs and I access to locked up spaces around the site and on this occasion, we were able to find out more about what happens to water when the reservoir levels get too high. The reservoir is positioned at different heights and consists of 3 large bodies of water which are held before the water is cleansed and distributed to homes across Rochdale. When water levels are high, the bodies of water are designed so that the water levels out across the different locations to quite dramatic effect around ‘the plug’ area.

AD: Large entrance to piping system that is situated on the surface of a body of water in the reservoir. The entrance looks like a circular spiral of steps that go down into a black nothingness.

Water rushes through this piping system at a great speed leading to an underground piping system that we were able to have a peek at through the shutters. At some point, Babs made a kind of throwaway comment about this structure by saying it looked like a blackhole. Back in the studio, I started to read about blackholes online and discovered that it was, for a long time, theoretically thought that if a person fell into a blackhole the body would be stretched out “like spaghetti” (https://www.space.com/15421-black-holes-facts-formation-discovery-sdcmp.html) and I started to imagine a piece of music for this location that would take this idea into consideration. The title ‘Cygnus’ is taken from the name of the first discovered blackhole.

I returned to Greenbooth armed with field recording gear to record the sound of rushing water that runs through pipes underneath the site that captured a kind of loud, heavy, and metallic drone sound which I imagined would represent a gravitational pull at the bottom of a blackhole. Later, I roughly pitched these recordings as sounding as G minor. I thought about rainfall at the top end of the plug structure entering an imagined blackhole with the water being stretched and elongated as it passed through and how that might sound played on a cello.

An early sketch of the piece:

AD: Sketch drawing of a column type structure that starts bigger at the top but gets incrementally smaller in steps to mirror the shape of the pipe entrance. The sketch contains a treble clef at the top, alto clef in the middle and 2 bass clefs at the bottom. There are also attempts at musical staves from the top to the bottom with raindrops drawn on top to indicate notation. At the bottom are a few stacked diamond shapes to indicate a drone. There are some random numbers on the left which I think represent timings.

Final score image. The colour and size of the raindrops roughly indicate the length that they should be performed for.

AD: Final version of previous sketch, same shape, and pattern but a lot neater and the lines are more defined. No clefs indicated on this version.

A stave printed onto acetate that can be placed on top of the previous image to help guide the player further in terms of pitch:

AD: This is the same shape as the last two but this one contains a conventional score inside the shape. 5 lines run across each stepped tier. At the top on the left there is a treble clef and 2 flat signs indicating a G minor. Halfway down the on the left there is an alto clef indicating a G minor and towards the bottom of the shape there is a bass clef G minor.

Having never written for cello before, I was quite naïve about the instrument’s capacity to play the higher pitches but luckily, when recording with Tom Hawkins, he was able to educate me about the timbral qualities of the cello in a clear and understanding way. As an example, the higher notes which I thought of as light raindrops are quite challenging to sound on the cello, but Tom was able to produce a fragile version of that section that worked well when it came to editing. As with Currents, these scores are intended to act as guides for recordings and to stand alone as visual artworks rather than strict pieces of composition to be played from start to finish.

During the production of the work, Babs’ was working on the idea of the water’s journey though the piping system and the AR visuals invite the viewer to travel down the pipe to the waters end. We worked the visuals very closely with the audio to create the most narratively led piece of the final 6 signposts.

Landscape Generated Composition overall has been a satisfying and creatively effective way for me to generate work. Throughout the process, I’ve realised that having visual references alongside sound really helps me to think through a concept for a piece and once that’s in place, the music comes a lot faster than on previous projects. When planning, I use words as well, but this approach brings things to life and feels like a more natural method. Additionally, I think that just spending time outside and listening to the landscape I was writing about also contributed to the fulfilment of the process and ultimately, I feel confident that the music and visuals created mirrors my experience of being immersed at Greenbooth Reservoir for audiences who visit.