Have you ever wondered what it sounds like in Oil Country?
Not the deafening roar of the crowd in Rexall Place, but what sounds you would hear in a field with an oil well drawing fossil fuels up from deep down in the earth's belly?
UAlberta Music Assistant Professor Dr. Smallwood has created a series of sound works based on pumpjack recordings in the Edmonton region. One of his recent electroacoustic oil well compositions, Elevating Results (2012), is featured in the program for Ultra.
Smallwood says each oil well has a very unique sound to it, although there are similarities among them.
"They are all mechanical and repeat what they are doing, over and over. There's a sense of effort and pulling - that they are doing work, and you can hear that. You hear what the weather has done to them over time. You hear them in the context of the nature that surrounds them, sometimes you hear the road. I try to make the recordings from a lot of different perspectives - from a distance and really close up, from different angles, and walking very slowly around them."
Born in Texas, Smallwood moved to the Colorado Rockies when he was three years old, but made the trek back through the Texan oil country by car many times throughout his childhood for family visits.
"I remember as a kid, seeing the oil wells in the distance, but I'd never heard them before. I always thought they looked like gentle creatures, that were soundless as you can't hear them from the road, but they were always a curiosity factor for me. Years later, I went back to those Texan oil wells and made recordings there too. I guess its become a bit of an obsession," he says chuckling.
With moving to Edmonton to teach at the University of Alberta, and being immersed back in oil culture, it re-sparked that interest for Smallwood.
To present Elevating Results in a concert setting for Ultra, the oil well recording will be played through a set of loud speakers in Convocation Hal
"There's nothing for the audience to see, they just hear the work. We sometimes refer to that as acousmatic, which just means its cinema for the ear with no performer but you just listen to it on a pair of nice speakers in a concert hall. I usually like to do those in the dark - turn the lights off and let people sort of imagine their own sort of imagery if they want."
Dr. Mark Hannesson is also presenting an electroacoustic piece at Ultra. At least half of the Ultra concert is a big, new piano work by Dr. Howard Bashaw, performed by new music enthusiast Roger Admiral. "It should be fantastic."
A great deal of Smallwood's work comes out a practice of gathering field recordings of either spaces or environments and sometimes objects. For instance, Smallwood's second piece featured in the Ultra program, Thalis Ringing, originated as a recording of metal plates being struck together. A thalis is a kind of Indian food, but is also the word used to describe a type of plate the food can be served on.
"A friend of mine gave me a couple of stainless steel dinner plates that have little compartments in them. The first thing I noticed about these things was that they had this wonderful sound."
Smallwood essentially made a recording of striking the two plates together, reversed it and stretched that out, analyzed it and orchestrated it for an ensemble to play. "It's not simply a direct transcription, but more a matter of extracting the basic pitch, then creating a composition out of that."
He says Thalis Ringing involves long-held gestures and textures. Guillaume Tardif, the violinist, plays only a couple of pitches throughout the piece, "but the way he plays it has a kind of trajectory to it, from really super quiet to as loud as possible at the end."
Not the deafening roar of the crowd in Rexall Place, but what sounds you would hear in a field with an oil well drawing fossil fuels up from deep down in the earth's belly?
UAlberta Music Assistant Professor Dr. Smallwood has created a series of sound works based on pumpjack recordings in the Edmonton region. One of his recent electroacoustic oil well compositions, Elevating Results (2012), is featured in the program for Ultra.
Smallwood says each oil well has a very unique sound to it, although there are similarities among them.
"They are all mechanical and repeat what they are doing, over and over. There's a sense of effort and pulling - that they are doing work, and you can hear that. You hear what the weather has done to them over time. You hear them in the context of the nature that surrounds them, sometimes you hear the road. I try to make the recordings from a lot of different perspectives - from a distance and really close up, from different angles, and walking very slowly around them."
Born in Texas, Smallwood moved to the Colorado Rockies when he was three years old, but made the trek back through the Texan oil country by car many times throughout his childhood for family visits.
"I remember as a kid, seeing the oil wells in the distance, but I'd never heard them before. I always thought they looked like gentle creatures, that were soundless as you can't hear them from the road, but they were always a curiosity factor for me. Years later, I went back to those Texan oil wells and made recordings there too. I guess its become a bit of an obsession," he says chuckling.
With moving to Edmonton to teach at the University of Alberta, and being immersed back in oil culture, it re-sparked that interest for Smallwood.
To present Elevating Results in a concert setting for Ultra, the oil well recording will be played through a set of loud speakers in Convocation Hal
"There's nothing for the audience to see, they just hear the work. We sometimes refer to that as acousmatic, which just means its cinema for the ear with no performer but you just listen to it on a pair of nice speakers in a concert hall. I usually like to do those in the dark - turn the lights off and let people sort of imagine their own sort of imagery if they want."
Dr. Mark Hannesson is also presenting an electroacoustic piece at Ultra. At least half of the Ultra concert is a big, new piano work by Dr. Howard Bashaw, performed by new music enthusiast Roger Admiral. "It should be fantastic."
A great deal of Smallwood's work comes out a practice of gathering field recordings of either spaces or environments and sometimes objects. For instance, Smallwood's second piece featured in the Ultra program, Thalis Ringing, originated as a recording of metal plates being struck together. A thalis is a kind of Indian food, but is also the word used to describe a type of plate the food can be served on.
"A friend of mine gave me a couple of stainless steel dinner plates that have little compartments in them. The first thing I noticed about these things was that they had this wonderful sound."
Smallwood essentially made a recording of striking the two plates together, reversed it and stretched that out, analyzed it and orchestrated it for an ensemble to play. "It's not simply a direct transcription, but more a matter of extracting the basic pitch, then creating a composition out of that."
He says Thalis Ringing involves long-held gestures and textures. Guillaume Tardif, the violinist, plays only a couple of pitches throughout the piece, "but the way he plays it has a kind of trajectory to it, from really super quiet to as loud as possible at the end."