Aural Textures Outside
(2020-07-03)

Over the past year, like much of south-eastern Australia, the place where I live has been affected by
drought, fire, severe hailstorms and the global COVID-19 pandemic. Responding to these events has made
me think about how boundaries fragment and create distinctions: inside/outside, public/private,
human/animal/machine, mine/yours/ours/theirs. The boundaries are containers for ideas; they help me
prioritise decisions, energy and information. They also help me forget, ignore, become blind. If I become
more aware of the boundaries, redraw them, then my perception and thinking can change too.
This pair are soundscapes generated by moving around inside and outside as I start the day. The first image
is a view of the large tree in the paddock (field) that I watch while drinking coffee on the couch. The second
image is a view looking up the trunk of this tree while in the paddock. The first soundscape is of footsteps
on a variety of surfaces inside the room. The second soundscape is of footsteps in the grasses in the
paddock. I experimented to find conditions that could combine footsteps with other ambient sounds,
because I wanted to capture more of a soundscape than isolated sounds. So, the body is part of the place,
not isolated from it. The final recordings were collected early in the morning, after the second workshop.