While many artist residency programs are geared to visual artists, a unique opportunity based at Florida’s Canaveral National Seashore is designed specifically with sound artists in mind.
The program, dedicated to preserving natural sound, began in 2019 as the first of its kind in the United States and involves an artist or a pair of artists who are invited to live in the Doris Leeper House within the park for five weeks each year. This year’s Atlantic Center for the Arts Soundscape Field Station, located east of Orlando, welcomed Perri Lynch Howard, a multidisciplinary artist based in Washington State, and Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist who cofounded Quiet Parks International.
Several weeks into their residency, the pair documented the dawn and dusk chorus of birds and insects, a rocket launch and the human noises that seep into the natural soundscape.
The experience of listening to the landscape, Howard said, “unfolds within the incredible legacy of Doris Leeper, who was an artist and environmental activist.”
ARTIST’S LEGACY
The late Leeper was an American sculptor and painter who was instrumental in the creation of Canaveral National Seashore in 1975 and the founding of the Atlantic Center for the Arts in 1982.
With the risk of widespread development along the seashore, Leeper fought to preserve the land around her home alongside the Mosquito Lagoon, where she lived with her two Great Danes and created art.
“Perri and I have been exploring what it is about this house, this place and this setting that fed Doris Leeper’s art,” Hempton said. “Something nurtured her soul for her to take the next step to orchestrate the founding of Canaveral National Seashore.
“Something magic happens to you as a human being when you’re no longer reminded of the modern outside world,” Hempton said. “You’re there with the complete knowledge and experience that it took millions of years to get you here through your evolution. It’s a transformative experience.”
Howard welcomed this residency as a way to contemplate the role of quiet in our increasingly frantic world.
“I don’t know that we’ve ever been more challenged to establish or maintain a sense of place,” she said. “This residency is a chance to both engage with nature in a very beautiful, privileged way as individuals, but it’s also a chance to engage park visitors and ask them to contemplate their own sense of place while they’re here.”
IN THE FIELD
On a breezy Friday morning, Howard gathered her gear and left the Leeper house to meet Nathan Wolek, a professor of digital arts at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, and his students for a field recording session.
While the wind hampered efforts to capture natural sounds above the surface, Howard and the students used hydrophones (waterproof microphones) to record the crashing of waves and the clicking sounds of shrimp.
Wolek was an ACA Soundscape Field Station artist in residence in 2020, during the COVID-19 shutdown, and he recorded the first visitors to return to the park when it reopened.
While Howard had previously used her hydrophone to capture “quiet waters” and whale sounds in the Arctic Circle, in Florida she used it with Hempton to capture the underwater rumbles caused by a rocket launch.
“My first in-person rocket launch was exhilarating. The sound was incredible. . . . The crashing ocean waves barely moved the gain on the microphone,” Hempton said. But “the [rocket’s] sound wave came through the hydrophone, and it went off the charts and distorted. That’s a huge amount of acoustic energy, which certainly every living creature felt.”
A QUEST TO SAVE QUIET
For more than three decades, Hempton has circled the globe three times in pursuit of the world’s quietest places. His experience led him to create One Square Inch of Silence, a project founded in Washington’s Olympic National Park based on the idea that protecting a small area of quiet can preserve large swaths of natural land.
“I hiked up on Earth Day 2005 to this location now known as One Square Inch of Silence, placed down a rock and quietly pledged to myself that I would defend it,” he said. Over the next decade, it became a book, film and a noise-control project.
About five years ago, Hempton cofounded Quiet Parks International to preserve wilderness areas and urban parks from noise pollution.
In their work, the artists have noticed “anthropogenic noise incursion” from boat traffic, low-flying flights and cars on State Road A1A at all hours of the night.
“At Canaveral National Seashore, what’s the impact of a passing car or a passing plane on wildlife?” Hempton said. “We shouldn’t ask ourselves, ‘How loud are the loudest sounds?’ We should consider even the faint sounds that we make and the impact on birds, reptiles and all the creatures who are detecting these faint sounds.”
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