# Melissa Pons

Slow traveller, Field Recordist and sound designer.

In 2016 Melissa started to explore the sound of forests after moving from Portugal to Stockholm in 2015. In the later part of 2016 she spent over a month in the Atlantic Forest in Brazil, in three different locations, triggering the beginning of releasing her recordings into the world with Nocturnal Sounds of the Atlantic Forest. Shortly after, she got to explore the Swedish Forest and is currently re-discovering the country in which she was born through its diverse natural soundscapes, starting by the mediterranean forest to the south, in a Wolf Sanctuary, out of which the album Wolf Soundscapes has been released in November 2020.

Her field recording albums reflect her experiences and personal impressions on those spots.

http://thesounddesignprocess.wordpress.com/

JrF: when & why did you become interested in field recording?

MP: The first, closest thing to field recording I did was to record a local ambiance for a short film I was working on and this was after my second year in University. I found everything to be very interesting and even intriguing but at the time I was just connecting that to sound for film. Later on, a professor that lectured a seminar on sound design during my studies in Music Production and Technology, organised a field recording trip with his class and invited me to go along. I was extremely lucky to have very good equipment available and in fact the first recordings I did on this trip were binaural, with 2 DPA’s 4060 taped on my ears. Obviously, the results I heard afterwards were incredible, particularly for someone who didn’t really know this technique before. I’ve shared this before and it’s a bit funny, that although I was excited to explore the area in this trip and found it great to have dedicated equipment, after that first day recording with the DPA – which was organised by this professor, Marco Conceição, I sat by a water stream for hours and recorded without a purpose; in other words, honestly I had no idea what I was doing. It wasn’t until that evening that the class returned to the houses and upon stopping the van he quickly hops off and looks for the equipment. I noticed a sense of urgency and asked ‘why’. He then said “can’t you hear?”. And then I realised a lot. There was an intense night insect song going on. That was the key moment that triggered change in me and my work.

JrF: how do you use your field recordings in your own artistic output?

MP: I wonder if Field Recording is itself my own entire artistic process. I don’t intend to intellectualise it or over analyse it. Field recording allows me to capture the novelty I look for when I am discovering a new place / culture. This is the lens I use when I am curating a field recording album: when something is heavily textured, a curious animal call, or when the biophony presents itself beautifully rich. This is what I want to deliver to the listeners: my emotional impressions, my own discovery process and the beauty I find in it. So, with that in mind, it’s not a documental process of the object, but I could say it’s my own.

JrF: do you regard ‘natural’ sounds as a musical element (bearing in mind that the conventional definition of ‘music’ is rapidly becoming obsolete) or as sound ? is this definition important to you ? does it matter ? (nb. the term ‘natural’ is used in this instance to describe any sound from any object, animal or human that is observed or documented rather than generated with apparent compositional intent)

The short answer is no.
There is a tendency I have and that it feels very common amongst those connected to music and/or sound in a profound way, which is to easily recognise patterns – both melodic and rythmic – in anything other than ‘music’. Personally, I feel like this association in my own process immediately transforms (or it is from the start) what I hear into something interesting, if not beautiful, even though I can question if novelty plays a big part of this perception (as in a the enthusiasm of discovering). So it is not uncommon that I hum along with a bird call when I am listening back to field recordings.
However, I don’t actively think of them as music. Naturally we can think if, for example, animals produce music by themselves (although we already use terms such as ‘bird song’), but something I have been learning is to not examine non-human things from a lens of our own experience. In itself, it’s perhaps impossible to do this exercise, but I find that it edges with an anthropocentric view which is, in my personal practice, best to distance from.
I do like to have present the emotional aspects from natural sounds and that has always played a big factor in my involvement with music, sound design and field recording. In that angle, that can be a very individual and subjective experiece which can then expand into any direction. The first (and one of very few times) I attributed a direct act or event to natural sounds, it was when I listened back to the first night recordings I’ve done in the Atlantic Forest. The unhurried insect song seemed to me like a gentle snorring to lull me sleep.

When I exercise attentive listening I can understand that there is an organisation of sounds – animal calls in time and frequency range – the ability to communicate with each other. But again, trying to distance myself from our own experience, I’d like to think of it, just like that.

JrF: how has the act of field recording altered the way you listen to your everyday surroundings and how has it affected the way you listen to other music and sound (if at all)?

It has changed everything. Firstly I became much more bothered by traffic and loud human and industrial sounds, to the point that very directly I feel quite drained by them. With that came an immense appreciation for quietness and a more acute sense of hearing, that I think is nothing more than appreciation of soundscapes. I became more sensitive towards noise pollution in predominantly natural areas and that has obviously led me to question some practices, from motor biking or partying in those areas, to our cultivated insensitivity of observation of a natural place and wild species.

I’ve noticed that much more things step out of the background and my capacity to form patterns in them seems to be increasing.

When it comes to the act of listing to music, I became very fond of textural and subtle sounds, whatever their source is. On the other hand, I confess that my immediate response towards “meditating music” that use bird song, seems often like a shallow, almost cheap approach. I can’t pin point exactly what bothers me yet, but I start to think of the idea that the way those are usually presented, are in a place of exclusive service for people and hinder everything else that happens in nature, almost romanticising it. This, in my opinion, leaves a lot of intricate and complex events in nature to seem unimportant and sort of blurs nature into something we formed as an idea of what is “ideal”. I think that nature sounds can also be oppressive and not all the times pleasant, but those are there to ground us in every aspect of the natural world. That being said, I receive with great gratitude messages from people who were able to sleep, relax, write or simply travel to another space and time with my field recording works. But then again, I consider my approach very different from what I mentioned above.

JrF: Perhaps you could discuss your recent project recording wolves and the resulting album?

This is actually a sub-project part of a larger one with the field recordist and sound artist Nils Mosh.
Some interesting things and reflections came from this alone, but the key idea comes from him and we have developed it together in the last year or so.
It focuses on the Wolf as a binary figure in the western world: while the presence of this animal has been shown to be fundamental for a healthy habitat, there is a lot of controversy about wolves being close to farmed areas. This is now a very specific and truly complicated issue in some regions of Germany, where all our recordings would, in principle, take place. Due to all the restrictions with the pandemic, we went forward with the idea of each of us starting to work in their own location. I have been staying in Portugal for the time being and so we found out about the Iberian Wolf Rehabilitation Centre where I volunteered for 12 days and recorded extensively. This was under the umbrella of a volunteer program, so I had to prepare food, feed the wolves and observe them, paired with recording anytime it was possible. There was also a great talk in the wolf centre that included a general history of the wolf around the world and the relationship that humans established with them, based on their spiritual beliefs. Sadly, in regions with a predominant christian culture / tradition, the wolf has been regarded as an ‘evil’ creature and have been hunted down to near extinction in the 20th century. There is an instigated fear, a fear that comes before any attempt of comprehension and most of us tend to avoid situations that incite that fear: whatever its origins, we don’t want to face the unknown. Leaving aside possible political agendas in the context of the duality mentioned above, it’s obvious that the fear of the unknown is not only applied to wolves, or even solely in the animal kingdom. So through them, through the figure of the wolf and by using it partially as a metaphor, with this work we are also discussing the rejection of strangers by people.
The album Wolf Soundcapes is a combination of my own discovery process and wonder of this hilly forest, the first contact with such sophisticated animals as well as the mutual habituation between them and me.
Since I am very driven by sensorial impressions and those can appear reconstructed in a quite interesting shape in states of being half a sleep, I let my constant nightmares and the afterwards fuzziness and confusion to remain with me on the senses in which I remember they manifested. Then, I suppose that, very naturally and absolutely influenced by the story of the red Riding Hood (in fact my grandmother called me a few days in to actually check if I haven’t been eaten) – which always triggered in me a vivid imagery, I thought that the idea of a child-like character, someone that has already built some ideas based on her worldview but still curious and open enough to build her own, moving between the oneiric and the tangible of her own reality experience. It’s this experience that she procures to expand and meet what she hears on her dreams. This comes in time and it involves her exploring the forest to the confines she was not supposed to go into. At the same time, the wolves in that forest are somewhat aware of her ability to step out of the dictated rules, and so they initiate a process of socialisation between them and her. This is why the album starts with a very distant and solitary howl and goes over a third its length with soundscapes of the forest that always translate her emotional state and thought process, with 2 day/night cycles, sometimes leaving a peek hole for some subtle movement from the wolves. After they reveal themselves to her openly as she explores deeper, which comes with long and loud howling, she is able to get more closely, to the point where she observes them eating and playing and there is a possible mutual understanding
Before I got there I really didn’t know what sort of sounds I would find or what other animals exist there and it turned out to be a powerful and nurturing experience to discover this place.