New sound installation May 2014!
Hugh is the current artist in residence at the Dumbarton Oaks Gardens in Washington, DC, adding a new artwork to the historic site. Opens May 9. Read about it here. |
New opera June 2014!
Hugh is creating a new opera with poet Fred Euphrat on the Russian River in Healdsburg, California, in the heart of Sonoma Wine Country. Three performances, June 6 and 7. Read about it here. |
image and video
Hugh Livingston creates site interpretations — using color palettes, text animations and tinted sunglasses — to suggest new ways to view the landscape. His artwork is connected to a sense of place, and is particularly oriented towards understanding river systems. By extracting and identifying colors from natural vistas, Hugh offers a vocabulary for parsing the environment, empowering the audience to generate their own color interpretation.
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music and sound
Hugh Livingston has performed one thousand cello concerts in his career, released 27 CDs, and written several site-specific operas. Hugh's dissertation was entitled Concepts of Time and Memory in the Music of Bernd Alois Zimmermann. His expertise in the interpretation of contemporary Asian music led to the discovery of more than 100 different techniques for plucking a cello string. He now unites his interest in contextualizing challenging musical textures with natural environments, creating juxtapositions of human musicmaking and outdoor experiences. Much of his performance work is produced solely for video, as the sites are inaccessible (cliffs at 13,000 feet, paleolithic sandstone caves, abandoned castles and water towers).
Hugh has moved sound experiences out of the concert hall and into the wild, assembling components of natural and manmade sound into layered, spatialized soundscapes. |
Philosophies of Soundscapes
Hugh Livingston has been exploring the outdoor perception and history of sound to shape a new experience. This includes issues of noise pollution and the subjectivity of personal experience when it comes to public sound, such as sounds associated with commerce, tourism, transportation, civic functions (police and fire), and industry. These perceptions are tempered by the value of soundmarks, the associations of historical uses of soundspace.
A second aspect is the history of outdoor musicmaking, associated mainly with Asian musical traditions and sheepherding around the world. Yodeling, a particular type of communication developed for mountainous regions, actually exists in 17 cultures around the world. Other interesting traditions include the Chinese gu qin, probably the quietest instrument ever built, in contrast to the penetrating sounds of bagpipes, drums, church bells and similar outdoor musical soundmakers. An ancient poem reads, "with the sounds of the wind in the pines, it is not even necessary to play gu qin". It is said that the musical accompaniment to the traditional Vietnamese water puppet theater sounds only discordant and poorly balanced when heard up close. But drifting across the water in the summer evening dusk, the instruments meld into a perfect balance to the listeners. I use these ideas to create outdoor explorations of our perceptions and to recreate historical associations, utilizing both live performers and electronic multichannel sound reproduction.
A third aspect is the model of the natural world, and the way bird calls and other animal sounds have evolved to create a total biome that maximizes interspecies communication and therefore economizes on energy consumption, while minimizing conflict for the same soundspace which would render communications inaudible. This is known as the Niche Hypothesis, and was radical when introduced by Bernie Krause but now is accepted as the only way to parse the natural environment.
In my own design of aesthetic and functional outdoor sound experiences, I combine all of these tranches with psychoacoustic principles - the precedence effect, for example - to create particular experiences. An aesthetic outdoor sound environment helps to call attention to the existing soundscape, making the real birds or wind whistle seem a bit more present, a bit more alive to the jaded listener, while gently shading that same soundscape with the motion of a few trilling instruments, an occasional snapped twig, a circulating hum that seems blown on the wind, a nocturne that evokes nostalgia, the sonic madeleine dipped in a warm cup of tea, remembrance of summer cicadas in the humid nights of youth.
A functional sound environment uses the aesthetic principles to solve problems of function in the space, particularly the mitigation of perceived noise pollution.
A second aspect is the history of outdoor musicmaking, associated mainly with Asian musical traditions and sheepherding around the world. Yodeling, a particular type of communication developed for mountainous regions, actually exists in 17 cultures around the world. Other interesting traditions include the Chinese gu qin, probably the quietest instrument ever built, in contrast to the penetrating sounds of bagpipes, drums, church bells and similar outdoor musical soundmakers. An ancient poem reads, "with the sounds of the wind in the pines, it is not even necessary to play gu qin". It is said that the musical accompaniment to the traditional Vietnamese water puppet theater sounds only discordant and poorly balanced when heard up close. But drifting across the water in the summer evening dusk, the instruments meld into a perfect balance to the listeners. I use these ideas to create outdoor explorations of our perceptions and to recreate historical associations, utilizing both live performers and electronic multichannel sound reproduction.
A third aspect is the model of the natural world, and the way bird calls and other animal sounds have evolved to create a total biome that maximizes interspecies communication and therefore economizes on energy consumption, while minimizing conflict for the same soundspace which would render communications inaudible. This is known as the Niche Hypothesis, and was radical when introduced by Bernie Krause but now is accepted as the only way to parse the natural environment.
In my own design of aesthetic and functional outdoor sound experiences, I combine all of these tranches with psychoacoustic principles - the precedence effect, for example - to create particular experiences. An aesthetic outdoor sound environment helps to call attention to the existing soundscape, making the real birds or wind whistle seem a bit more present, a bit more alive to the jaded listener, while gently shading that same soundscape with the motion of a few trilling instruments, an occasional snapped twig, a circulating hum that seems blown on the wind, a nocturne that evokes nostalgia, the sonic madeleine dipped in a warm cup of tea, remembrance of summer cicadas in the humid nights of youth.
A functional sound environment uses the aesthetic principles to solve problems of function in the space, particularly the mitigation of perceived noise pollution.
