Presented by The Radiophonic Institute and the Museum Of Sound, The Sound Of The Year Awards is an annual competition celebrating sonic life in its many forms from across the globe. We caught up with Oksana Rudko, winner of the Best Imagined Sound award, which asks entrants to “Describe a compelling sound that doesn’t yet exist”
Tell us about what’s happening in your recording…
“I tried to record an imaginary sound that disappears in the far north due to climate changes. The uniqueness of the sound is that it occurs naturally only at temperatures of -50 degrees celsius. When a person breathes in such conditions, the exhaled air instantly turns into invisible ice crystals, which, colliding with each other, form a specific crackling sound. This happens due to the collision of very frosty air with warm air. In the past, the inhabitants of Yakutia called this crackling “the whisper of the stars”, also associating its appearance with the abundance of stars in the sky on long and windless winter nights. Telling about what this sound is like, the Yakuts compared it to the rustle of dry grains pouring out.
“It was quite cold that day. I went into my kitchen in São Paulo, turned on the recorder, and began pouring rice from a package into a clay plate. The calendar showed the beginning of June, and in the Southern Hemisphere this is when winter begins. It was enough to close one’s eyes to hear and visualize the rustling of rice grains turning into the whispering of the northern stars.”
Your immediate reaction after making it?
“I shared this story and invited various people from other South American countries to participate in the experiment and record the sounds of moving grains or seeds for my art project. When I collected everything and listened to the recordings together, I was stunned by their diversity and the cosmic detachment, even coolness, that each sound gave. It was an incredible feeling and realization that through an idea, a story, and the collective practice of field recording, we are able to touch the sound of the distant northern stars here in South America.”
How do you feel listening to it now?
“It seems to me that trying to record imaginary sound created additional space around the actual recorded sounds. From the literal, even partly manual process of field recording, we jumped into a poetic layer of reality, where the aesthetics of everyday sounds is overgrown with additional narrative. When I listen to the field recordings from this project today, I also think about the documentation of these moments in the life of each participant. It seems to me that this is the magic of field recording, it is able to move us in time and space. If I take my mind off the concept completely, this sound collage turns out to be exhilarating and meditative at the same time, somehow miraculously it even possesses something electric.”
What’s your background in recording sound?
“I work as a sound artist and I have been making field recordings since 2007, I think. That was when I bought my first player with a built-in recorder, and since then I have been recording everything that touched me. At that time, I was a student in the journalism department, working on the radio at the same time and learning the possibilities of sound editing. I have always worked with live field recordings, making collages from them, poetic sound sketches, sound portraits of my travels, but I have never made music from it. Perhaps, I will do this later.
“Since I’ve been making art, I have been using sounds in almost all my art projects. I work a lot with geographical migration of sound and the visualisation of field recordings, mixing sounds and noises from photographs with real sounds, mini-interviews, sounds of streets, forests, and then visualizing this experience. Jokingly, I equate my simple life and reportage photographs with sound recordings, because today technology allows you to make sound from any image. I work with sound recordings from photographs as well as with field recordings. The project ‘Whisper Of The Stars’ presents a basic visualisation of the sounds of moving grains recorded for an acoustic installation. In other projects I create more complex visual collages from photo-noises and field recordings.”
What inspires you?
“I am inspired by sound itself, by what shocks and arouses curiosity. It can be a sound whose origin I cannot explain, or the familiar singing of birds, or the sounds of revolutions, rapping in an unknown language in a subway, people shouting from windows, and the sound of pots and pans echoing through the concrete high-rises of São Paulo during elections or football matches. If I hear something unusual, it means the record button is already pressed!”
The best advice you’ve ever been given or would give?
“Listen to your intuition, and to good music. As one of my favourite writers, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote – ‘For me, music is proof of God’s existence. It is so wonderful that even in the hardest times of my life, when I turn it on, everything around me is transformed.’
If you could only ever record one more thing, what would it be?
“I would like to record the sound of a plant emerging from a seed, or the moment the needle touches a vinyl record on different turntables. There is so much work ahead.”
To find out more about the Sound Of The Year Awards, go to soundoftheyearawards.com
