Personal Contract for Site-Specific Soundscape Composition:

This set of rules or guidelines is a pattern created as a way to impose certain discipline to my personal work. Those rules are a way to be faithful to a conceptual idea, the idea of Sound Placement or Site-specificity. This are the main guidelines that I impose to myself if I am working in a composition that is meant to be placed on a concrete location, this concrete location is going to be referenced as the placement zone. Placement Zone means the place in which our sound piece is meant to be.

This paper doesn’t tend to impose a rule to all artists working in similar fields; it’s just a personal methodology for composing. The Contract is inspired by the P.C.C.O.M manifesto by Matthew Herbert in 2005, which can be consulted at the composer’s official webpage.

Recording and archiving.

I. Sound sources and recordings must be taped in the placement zone or in the surrounding areas.

II. Found Sounds in location and accidental sonic events occurring during the recordings must be preserved and kept as native elements of the placement zone.

III Meteorological facts must be preserved as are native from the place of the recording even that in
the time domain can be misfit.

IV. While archiving our sounds from a location is important to geotag44 all sounds keeping always information of the place where they where recorded. GPS accuracy can be useful in certain cases.

Composing.

I. As far as possible the production of the piece must be done on location. All the processes involved on the compositional work must be done in place or nearby areas. Having always the possibility of hearing the results in their place.

II. The organisation of the different sonic events in the composition has to be tided to the geographic and natural features of the place where we are working on.

III. Concepts such as narrative, time and space are issues to consider on the compositional level.

IV. In the sound processing level, space effects must be avoided if the features of the location lacks of this kind of acoustic elements. This means not to use reverberation or echoes if there is none of them on location.

Distribution, Performance, Display.

I. Since your work is site-specifically designed this have to be preserved whenever we played back or perform the work.

II. Distribution of the work must be done on location. This can be done through a virtual system using locative devices, or leaving a physical stashed container and keeping Latitude - longitude data of the stash place.

III. In the case of performing our sound compositions this must be done because obvious reasons among the placement zone premises.

IV. From the perspective of Acoustic ecology the performance and display of the sound composition have to be respectful with the environment and following the correspondent laws involving sound levels. A recommendation to avoid problems at this stage is the use of headphones as a non-invasive media.

V. If the Sound Composition have to be played through loudspeakers. A permission from the authorities have to be issued according to the environmental laws involving sound levels, if there are so.