Showing at SOMArts. Nov.16-18, 2012

Waking in my terrace apartment in Nima, an ethnically diverse and class-mixed neighborhood of Accra, Ghana, once-strange sounds have now, after five years, become so familiar that I have the sensation of first opening my ears and eyes to the performance of an electro-acoustic composition in a concert hall. Did I hear that – or did I dream I heard it?

As the sun begins to rise I become aware of the sonic dawn of mosque and church sounds filling out in the surround of roosters, car alarms, voices, street vendors, a distant train. At a moment of emergent conscious awareness I realize that this whole ambient ground is acoustically figured through the presence of songbirds excitedly calling from a tree next to my window.

Waking in Nima is an ambient audio composition that follows my process of waking into acoustic awareness. The sound is mixed from eight real-time tracks recorded 4:30-6:30am from microphones placed in nearby trees and on the roof of my flat. The exhibition excerpt runs 15 minutes.

~Steve Feld

Steve Feld is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. His research principally concerns the anthropology of sound and voice, which led him to spend almost twenty-five years studying the soundscapes of the Bosavi rainforest in Papua New Guinea. Both his writing and his artistic practice bring together the natural and human worlds, figuring a singular environment of sound that includes the hum of the rainforest and the call-and-response of bird songs together with human-produced language, poetry, and music.

More recently, Feld has spent time studying Greek Macedonia and Romani instrumentalists. He lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he is an active member of the city’s musical scene.