Deep Within the Forest Pt.II
Exploring the sounds of the forest with French artist and field recordist Mélia Roger
“ I was amazed to see that sound can have this power on other beings than humans and so I wanted to try out curating soundscapes for non-humans, put myself into their shapes and imagine what they would need to listen to…”
- Mélia Roger
Following on from my recent feature Deep Within The Forest - in which I touched on my own experiences recording soundscapes and atmospheres deep in the forests of Auvergne - I decided to reach out to an artist whose work I have been drawn to and inspired by for quite some time…
Mélia Roger is a field recordist and artist, based in France, whose work explores the sonic poetics of the landscape, searching for the invisible layers between human and non-humans. She very kindly agreed to share some words and insights about her creative practice and approaches to sound recording in the forests.
Her latest work Dear Phonocene, is a fascinating new audio-visual work inspiring ecological change through environmental reflection and empathic listening. It can be seen at Le Fresnoy in Tourcoing (France) until January 5th 2025.
- Hi Melia! Thanks for taking the time to share some insight into your practice with Sonic Tapestries.
I would like to start by asking you about - Dear Phonocene - Can you tell us about the work and how this relates to your practice of recording sounds in the forest?
Hi Mat :) Thank you for your questions. Dear Phonocene takes root in the industrial forests around my home in the Rhône region of France. Inspired by recent scientific studies on acoustic enrichment showing that sound diffusion in damaged environments can help their restoration, I wanted to adopt this method by inviting sound recordists to play back recordings in forest plantations and clear-cut areas. The sounds we are playing were recorded on site over several years, collected in bits of forest that have since been cut down or in unlogged areas. Here, without scientific pretension but as a poetic act of acoustic care, our playbacks represent a certain reactivation of a past soundscape. Like a distant memory of extinct species, could these sounds perhaps have a positive impact on these places?
The term "Phonocene" is directly borrowed from Donna Haraway, and taken up by Vinciane Despret to propose a philosophical concept of an era where attention is paid to the sounds of the earth. How do we listen to these remaining voices? What do we take in when we take in sound? How do we return these voices? The "Dear Phonocene" installation documents this research. It is now played at Le Fresnoy (studio national des arts contemporains) in Tourcoing (North of France) until January 5th. It is shown as an installation for 4.1 surround system and active headphones. The public listens to the combination of both (speakers + open headphones) and can choose when they are listening to certain sounds. The main idea of this setup is to put the audience into an active listening position, and also realise that when they only listen to the remaining sounds in the speakers, there is pretty much not much to hear except for distant motors, planes and other humans…
“ In the forests next to my home, there were many locations that I had recorded that had since been cut down by the logging industry. I wanted to play back those sounds into the clear cuts of these forests, imagining that this would be a poetic act of acoustical care, for the remaining roots and soil bugs. I didn’t have the pretension that it might have a positive impact, I just wanted to try out what poetics it brings back to activate certain sounds where they were missing. ”
- Mélia Roger
- You mention that Dear Phonocene is a project "qui parle du soin sur des paysage, soin sur des forêts et du soin par l'écoute" (which speaks about caring for the landscapes, caring for forests and caring through listening). Is this a key thematic across your work?
I think that care and empathy through listening is really central in my practice. It is my way to discover places, people… other than humans. Sometimes, it can be a “self-care”, as I explored with the work - Caring for the hum - a gathering of YouTube comments of people listening to air conditioners and ventilations to relax and fall asleep. But it was also a key word in my pieces - Intimacy of lichens - and - Intimacy of stones - as if sound and listening could bring us closer to the other forms of life around us. In “Dear Phonocene”, I started the piece being inspired by a recent article about acoustic enrichment in coral reefs, showing that the playback of sound could help restore damaged environments. I was amazed to see that sound can have this power on other beings than humans and so I wanted to try out curating soundscapes for non-humans, put myself into their shapes and imagine what they would need to listen to. In the forests next to my home, there were many locations that I had recorded that had since been cut down by the logging industry. I wanted to play back those sounds into the clear cuts of these forests, imagining that this would be a poetic act of acoustical care, for the remaining roots and soil bugs. I didn’t have the pretension that it might have a positive impact, I just wanted to try out what poetics it brings back to activate certain sounds where they were missing.
- How does listening to the sounds of the forest make you feel personally? What words come to mind when you want to describe these sounds? Would you say that forest sounds possess a particularly therapeutic effect?
I have various listening approaches depending on the locations I am in, or depending on projects etc… so there is no straight answer to your question. I can be amazed by the acoustics of a forest if I hear a troglodytes singing inside, even though the forest or the tree plantation is completely artificial. And I can also be super disappointed if I find myself in a location where the landscape is so preserved, with a lot of biodiversity but under a plane line, with a constant rumble of a distant aircraft. What I really enjoy and what feels good is to wait for the sounds to appear, and welcoming them if they decide to show up. I feel very lucky if I listen to a bird. I don’t know if this activates a certain therapeutic effect but what I realise for sure is that it acts on my stress level, reducing it a lot. I live in Saint-Denis, close to Paris, and there, because I am always so attentive to my surroundings, it feels very hard sometimes to be outside, because it’s so loud and stressful. I wish large cities had more quiet areas, large parks etc, for the people to have access to silence and also not to mask the vocalisations of the local biodiversity.
- With your creative process - which part do you find the most rewarding and which part do you find the most difficult?
That’s a hard question. I love exploring places with my ears and microphones. I try to spend as much time as I can outdoors. This is really rewarding for me, when I get to hear something I was hoping to listen to, I feel very alive and honest doing it. The hard part in my practice is to make the pieces accessible to a large public. As an artist, I am now learning a lot about the diffusion of my work. Most places are not prepared to welcome sound works. It’s always a bit frustrating, like at the moment in Le Fresnoy, there are 25 other installations around my work, also with sound and image. This is completely normal of course. But when sound and delicate listening is your main matter, it’s a bit difficult to give the best experience of your work to the audience. To make the installation - Dear Phonocene - travel, this will be quite challenging ! But I am looking forward to seeing which opportunities it will bring :)
- You have worked on the creation of an immersive library of tree recordings with the incredible HAL Audio team using a specific configuration called the Atmos Tree - could you tell us a little more about this project and what it was like recording ambiences with so many microphones?!
Yes ! I have a very technical background in sound engineering and this project is nourishing the little geek inside me! With HAL (especially Grégoire Chauvot, Antoine Martin and Rodrigo Sacic among others), we have been developing a 7.0.2 tree dedicated to Dolby mixing theaters. The idea was to record libraries in a format already immersive, that you can just drag and drop into your DAW to fill out the 9 channels of your Dolby Atmos bed. You don’t have to decode anything like with Ambisonics, it is a very straight forward set up. But it’s 13 kg including the Scorpio…!! It has been quite a journey since we started… When Greg and I met, we put together some gear to do a little 7.0 umbrella (with a 2 CHF red cute umbrella), then we made a hole to add a stereo bar at the top. Because Nicolas Becker had the opportunity to work on a Dolby Atmos film, we managed to hurry up the project and create with a designer a foldable 7.0.2, inspired by Michael Williams’s arrays. Then, in discussion with Dolby France, we came up with another version. In the meantime, we had already recorded a city library, and we decided to release it to have feedback on the use of those 7.0.2 sounds. We are now about to finish the second library, 1.5 year later… It takes sooo much time to work on this! And it is really not an easy market. For the upcoming library, we have been recording in various forests, in different seasons, in various weathers. It’s a great chance for me to be able to shift my artistic practice to this more technical “library” way of recording. It’s really different, we are not looking for the same sounds at all. With the 7.0.2 Atmos Tree, Greg and I are searching for a constant background with diffuse punctual events that will make the atmosphere alive but not too much, so we can edit other sound layers on top. In my artistic practice, I’m searching for proximity effects, unexpected events and encounters in the soundscape, I can walk while recording, I can include my presence in the sounds etc… It’s another approach, it’s another freedom. What I like with the Atmos tree project is that it’s a great excuse to scout for new locations, learn more about ethology and local biodiversity. It brings a great knowledge about the current health of the soundscape in France… It’s very time consuming and demanding, and sometimes we come back with nothing good. But it’s a great experience and a nice excuse to be outdoors in any season !
- I notice that a lot of your work is published for playback in surround sound. Do you find this format is the best suited for reflecting the true ambience and sound signature of a space?
I am really afraid of live situations, I rarely do performances (I just start to slowly like it…). And as I work a lot for post production for film, I started to work for spatial sound installations. It was very natural for me to think of sound spaces because it was bringing an active position of the audience, where a person can move close to a speaker, and choose their listening position… I like this idea that your position in space creates how sound is transformed over time. I also like to work for headphones, because it brings another relation, it’s much more intimate, we can feel very very close to a body. Those spatial works demand more - more time, more equipment, more space, more silence around… I feel very lucky when I have the opportunity to show my work in the format it was thought for. But I often stay in a quite traditional format of electroacoustic pieces (like 4.0 / 5.0 etc). I would like to be more experimental about this, work with different types of speakers, various sizes and forms etc. It is somehow what I started to experiment with “Dear Phonocene”, have the double layers and speakers PLUS headphones playing together. This was quite fun to do, and it brought it a lot to the narration of the project.
- Could you tell us a little more about your practice - what equipment or software do you cherish most in the field and in the studio?
So, I come from sound for film. In this industry, Pro Tools is still the main used software to deal with sound and editing. I feel very confident (and very fast) using it also for my own productions and when I collaborate with others. It happens sometimes that I’m asked to work on Reaper, but it’s very rare. Otherwise, I have a lot of fun using Ableton and Max MSP. But when I deal with projects which have a programming component, I rather collaborate with people who know those software better than me. I’m better at producing and connecting with people and institutions than to work on Max, for sure!
In terms of recording equipment, I share most of my gear with Grégoire Chauvot. And together, we start to have a very nice panel of various microphones, like a LCR (MKH 8040 ORTF + MKH 8050 in the center) for atmospheres, a Schoeps MS (with CCM41), a Telinga parabolic dish and various DIY hydrophones, Geofon, contact mics, electromagnetic microphones etc. We also have a couple of tiny set ups to do some drop rigs around, like a Sony A10 / Zoom F3 with UsiPro from LOM. We use this in some dry bags and leave them in the landscape so they can record for several hours without us being there. I really like to have a variety of tools, it’s like looking through different lenses, sometimes you need new eyes / ears to discover unexpected parts of a place. I also bring them into workshops etc, so it’s nice to have a certain variety of tools!
- What were your first activities recording sound? When did you realise that you wanted to pursue this as a creative and professional path?`
My very first experience recording sound was with my piano when I was a kid. I was a complete fan of Michael Nymann and I was in a very conservative music school where I was not allowed to play his music for the semester’s concert, because he was not a “real composer”. I was so frustrated that I asked my father, who had a small recorder, to help me record a trace of me playing his music. He made a cute CD of it and I offered it to the director of the music school. I was like… 9 or 10? It was a very strong experience for me, to know that sound can have this power for memory and proof. It was like keeping a part of the truth. And afterwards, I decided to study sound and it began a very natural matter to evolve in.
- What does the term "audio-naturalist" mean to you?`
The term “audio-naturalist”, if I hear it as a French word, refers to the discipline that Fernand Deroussen tried to develop during his whole life. Listening to natural environments, for their beauty, for their uniqueness, also with a certain naturalist / environmentalist ear. It is not just about the beauty of the sounds but also having a certain knowledge about which species is singing, why it is particular, when it occurs etc… It brings other forms of knowledge than just good ears, it triggers another layer of being interested in the life that you’re listening to. In English I would say that this is closer to being a wildlife sound recordist… In the Francophone association of audio naturalists called SONATURA, there is for sure, a component of composition and listening experience in the studio afterwards. For me, the most interesting part of this is to gain knowledge about biology, ornithology, ethology, entomology etc. It’s about knowing better to protect better. And the sound component of this curiosity is very important.
- Thinking perhaps of individuals, collectives or philosophies... Who has inspired you most in your work?
I’m now starting a practice-based thesis about the relations between sound arts and acoustic ecology, focusing on environmental sound installations… so there are many many people I would like to quote! But apart from books, there are artists who inspired me. The first person would be of course Félix Blume, because he was coming from cinema as well, and drifted to the arts… When I was studying, I envied his freedom, to use sound but working both for others and himself. He was a very important figure to allow myself to do things a bit aside from what my colleagues from Louis-Lumiere were doing. Another person would be Marc Namblard, a French audio-naturalist based in the east of France. First, I admire so much his sounds. I wish I would record soundscapes as beautiful and intimate as what he is recording. I think Marc is part of an inter-generation, after the “parents” of wildlife field recording in France like Jean-Claude Rocher or Fernand Deroussen, Marc is someone who politicised his practice much more than his peers were. The ecological crisis that we are living in, the enormous loss of biodiversity that we can hear is also making him make some choices like… just listen in his nearby environment. Not always be this manlike figure of going in untouched places and record their remaining sounds as so many others are doing right now. I like this approach. I try to do the same, work from home, from my parent’s house, from my friends’s windows… exploring with the train. I think my generation is even more obliged to do this. We cannot complain about the amount of planes above our heads and take a plane to go and record in preserved places… About this subject, writers like Juliette Volcler or Mark Peter Wright are opening new concepts to think about field recording practice during a time of uncertainty and a damaged planet. And of course, just saying that I feel very grateful to know other female figures around like Melissa Pons, Laura Giannone, Noémie Delaloye, Iga Vandenhove, Floriane Pochon or other composers like Aline Penitot, Diane Barbé, Jana Irmert… It is so important to mention them because we give each other role models to continue what we do.
Seeking wisdom from the insights of others has inspired me greatly on my path, and being here on this platform offers something that I want to explore more of in my work by way of opening out my discussions to readers and listeners.
Got your own field recording story you’d like to share…?
I’m going to be featuring more of these stories in future. I really dig hearing other people’s perspective — the challenges, joys, trials and tribulations, however arbitrary or convoluted — so please feel free to get in touch if you have an idea, a project or a story you would like to share!
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Mat
🌻
Wow. This is incredible.
The Q and A was great. The “Caring for the Hum” piece was visceral and personal. In a perfect world I would absorb them separately, but I didn’t. Still, they did build off each other and I was able settle in for the final minutes of the narrative. The spaciousness of it is inspiring! Thanks for sharing Mat.