Sound as Power - Translating Trees in Aviva Rahmani's Blued Trees

Aviva Rahmani is a transdisciplinary artist with a focus on the natural world. This paper will take into account her piece, Blued Trees, a multiple site-specific art project that originated in Peekskill, New York in June 2015. As a transdisciplinary installation, my focus will be on the convergence of sound and visuality and how visual prevalence affects the function of sound in art. This convergence will open up discussion for considering the effect of sound on the relationship between human and nature, pressing the acknowledgement of the concept of acoustic ecology.

The installation originally consisted of the painting of selected trees along the measure of the proposed Algonquin natural gas pipeline which, when distinctly plotted and viewed aerially, can be translated onto sheet music that thus can be globally performed and produced. Each tree was painted with the same sine wave symbol and thus was aimed to fall under copyright law in Rahmani's name. This meant that the land on which the trees were painted would have become protected under this copyright, therefore the pipeline could not have continued without disturbing branded land. Unfortunately, the act of copyright was unsuccessful meaning that the artwork was torn down in November 2015 to make way for the pipeline. Nonetheless, Rahmani has continued with the project in other areas.

As a form of activism and art, Blued Trees opens up questions of how we, as humans, can and/or should experience the environment and what the role of sound is in this experience. Rahmani's project both subscribes and subverts the tropes of acoustic ecology, a concept that analyses the relationship between humans and the environment through sound. With its roots in soundscape ecology, acoustic ecology records unaltered sounds heard in an environment as resources with the aim of better understanding ecological and environmental issues. It will be argued that Blued Trees Symphony, the music resulting from the Blued Trees project, is a developed form of acoustic ecology in that the spatial and visual interpretation of trees in a designated space creates music that then promotes awareness of ecological problems: the placement of gas pipelines in multiple locations. In defining the use of acoustic ecology, the role of the visual in this focally sonic project is highlighted and will first be addressed as a contribution to the production and centrality of sound and the role of activism. By using the function of acoustic ecology, the question of the naturalness resulting from the visual predominance of sound produced by the trees in Rahmani's piece will be tackled, in comparison to traditional notions of environmental/ecological soundscapes where only immediate sound is recorded and used.

Theoretically, the project could have been successful. In the physical sense, by painting the trees and applying copyright law to them as installation objects, the land would become protected as a work of art. Blued Trees evokes the language of the Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA) and thus was aimed to be legally protected due to its placement on private land. The trees were plotted along a path that would make it impossible for heavy machinery to pass. Their copyrighted protection also meant that their destruction would have been an infringement on the VARA.

Rahmani has also implemented an international 'Greek Chorus' which proposes that members of the public can paint trees for their own activism that will thus be protected by the copyright of Blued Trees. However, the trees are more than just visually and physically striking, the music produced from their plotting stands apart from the visual aesthetic. By creating music, Blued Trees can be projected globally in a more effective manner of activism through the ease of sharing sound in our platform society.

Blued Trees is visually striking, and it seems that as a statement the visual would have been enough for copyright. Rahmani goes past the visual with the addition of manipulated sound which aims to create a deeper connection and cultural understanding with the environment. Scholars consistently argue across the board that eco sound art at its core works to raise awareness and reimagine spaces through public engagement (Gilmurray 82; Krause & Monacchi 301-311; Paine 172). Artists thus have more recently been involving sound as a medium in order not only to raise awareness, but to understand nature from new perspectives that invite an innovative motivation to act (Gilmurray 72). The primacy of visuality in our culture directly affects how one interprets environmental issues (Polli 259) therefore by introducing a sonic aspect to her project, Rahmani creates another level of sensory experience which is often received as a more personal and bodily process and thus perhaps more influential.

Nonetheless, Blued Trees still has a visual focus. The purpose of the art as activism is only defined through its visual nature under the VARA which emphasises the distance created by humans from the nature - we are willing to protect things that we see and thus immediately impact our awareness, rather than strive to save sounds that we only feel to absorb subconsciously. If Blued Trees had become successful in its 2015 origins, it would have been due to the visuality and physicality of the trees blocking the machinery path, rather than an interruption of noise through the music. It is important to note that the only possible way to access and hear the Blued Trees Symphony, outside of its physical setting in the USA, is as the backing sound to Rahmani's mini documentary showing the process of the project. Even when trying to focus on the sound 'produced' by the trees, the listener (or viewer) is bombarded with 'sonic imagery', by which I mean the sheet music, the symbolic map of the Blued Trees and the visual representation of sound via the key symbol of sine waves. The sound is heard but is still not the focus, it is the background to the visual. This would obviously not be the case for the concerts at which the Blued Trees Symphony was performed, yet the lack of access to the music/sound undermines the heightened impact of awareness that so many scholars pin to sound art.

The subconscious visual focus of Rahmani's work questions the focality of acoustic ecology I announced as central to my analysis. However, I would also argue that Blued Trees functions productively both visually and sonically, that the sound develops on the strength of visual predominance, and it is perhaps the combination of the two approaches that makes this project potentially so functional in an activist sense. By combining the two, one can experience something outside the body, the visual, and something more deeply personal and engrained within the body, the sound (Gilmurray 76). This combination can be depicted in the choice of the Blued Trees symbol - the sine wave. Rahmani states the choice of the symbol being due to its connotations of the “physics of sound, light, movement and time” that are central to the symphony (3). Much like the sheet music, the sine wave becomes sonic imagery, an activist logo that connotes sound yet still relies on the visual prevalence in culture for understanding and copyright validation.

It is this intersection between visual and sound that allows me to return to acoustic ecology as it highlights a distinction in the way humans perceive the environment/nature around them. Can we only become aware of environmental issues when they are translated for human senses? Blued Trees perhaps creates an artificial form of the environment by painting nature with human-made understandings (sine waves) and creating music only through the translation of selected space, rather than the 'true' sounds of a simply recorded habitat.

Jonathon Gilmurray (71) asks, what is the sound of climate change? Is it the noise pollution of urban environments? The sacred silence of an empty forest? The crashing of waves? The musical score of blue trees? Acoustic ecology helps us to understand the sounds of our environment and our relationship to them, creating a different perspective from the visual, and thus builds an understanding of what is damaging nature.

Acoustic ecology's founder, R. Murray Schafer, focused the original intent of the concept as an attempt to understand the acoustic environment as music and that we, as humans, are responsible for its composition (205). In terms of this composition, traditional acoustic ecology focuses on recording the 'natural'/unmanipulated sounds in the hopes that highlighting such non-human sounds will create a stronger human relationship with the environment.

I would like to draw on this natural/unmanipulated distinction in the context of the Blued Trees Symphony. As a black and white argument, one could claim that Blued Trees Symphony does not subscribe to the tropes of acoustic ecology due to its distinct human manipulation. It is not the 'natural' sound of the wildlife or the trees it employs, and the music is even plotted from a route that is wholly manufactured from human use and consumption - the gas pipeline. However, looking past this problematic concept of what is natural, one must understand that all sound is augmented and manipulated by its environment (Paine 171) and that sound heard by human ears is already an 'unnatural' translation of a sonic environment purely by being received through the limitations of the human body. Unlike certain animals in the natural environments we claim to love to hear, humans lack the function to perceive all the frequencies of any given environment. If we cannot truly perceive the full impact of any given environment, why can it not be plausible for a sonic environment to be heard in another way?

Blued Trees Symphony is defined music, it is performed chorally, written as sheet music and thus has a focus on sound quality and pitch, such are distinctions of traditional music (Polli 260). By defining Rahmani's project as music created from the visual, I argue that this does not remove it from the positive connotations of acoustic ecology. If all sounds are augmented for human perception anyway then Blued Trees Symphony does not stand individual in this sense. In fact, as music, one could argue that the symphony is a more productive augmentation of sound because it collaborates with the visual to depict an immediate and pressing issue of gas pipeline placement. However, this statement would also create a hierarchy of environmental issues rather than forming a cyclical relationship and mutual understanding with nature as is the aim of acoustic ecology. The music of Blued Trees Symphony does not become a virtual or unnatural soundscape or a negative outcome of controlling a sonic environment rather than a natural expression of it (Wrightson 12), instead it becomes exactly this natural expression, a sonic environment that would not have been heard without human interpretation or manipulation.

Although unsuccessful in its visual sense in the 2015 introduction of the project, the sound of Blued Trees and the environment or soundscape it represents lives on through this music. It is this continuation of sound from an area now destroyed that shifts our “conceptualisation of daily life” (Pazanoski-Browne 13). The Blued Trees Symphony creates a soundtrack to an environment that has been absorbed by the consequences or actions of climate change and human desire for immediate and efficient energy that controls how we experience the everyday. The act of listening to the music thus would hopefully change the perception of the nature around us, a nostalgia for something lost might promote the protection of something for the future. Being bombarded with climate change imagery so frequently in the media, like oil-slicked birds or melting ice caps, is seemingly having little effect on the way humans act to protect the environment around them. It is here that I argue for the effectiveness of sound and Blued Tree's adapted acoustic ecology as a form of activism and influence. By expanding interaction with nature to another sense, or combining sensory interactions as Blued Trees does, one forms a broader understanding of the natural world.

If acoustic ecology aims for humans to develop an acute awareness of their impact on the environment (Paine 173) then hearing/listening to music translated for humans in a more 'artificial' manner than traditional acoustic ecology should heighten this impact. It suggests that even the sounds and areas manufactured by humans are not safe from the consequences of climate change, therefore our anthropocentric leaning is played upon, promoting a more active role in environmental protection within our collective society.

Although at first seen as an overpowering aspect of Blued Trees, visuality overall becomes a positive impact upon the sonic. Through the sonic imagery and physical representation of sound in sine waves, visual prevalence benefits the inclusion of sound in activist art. This elevation of sound allowed for the entanglement of acoustic ecology with the object. The combination of sensory interpretations highlights potential increased awareness through a broader interaction of media, whether they be human-made or 'natural'. While the original Blued Trees installation of 2015 failed to block the Algonquin pipeline, its creation and subsistence through music has formed a stronger dialogue between the visual and sound, art and activism, human and nature, that will promote an increased awareness of climate change and other environmental issues requiring immediate human action.