For the Lapataia Valley crossing (TIF 2023) we experimented with different methods of ‘registering’ the way, time, movement, progress, rhythm, structure, topography, climate, social interaction…
One attempt was a long duration recording (LDR) of the whole process. In total 416 hours of constant audio recording. Below you see the visual representation of that recording as a spectrogram mapped on the timeline. Certain events and conditions are characterized by their audible frequencies, highlighted and marked.
Author archives: Carsten Stabenow
Environmental Linguistics
purīyaū
To come with noise as wind through a hole, as a sound from a trumpet.
To make any buzzing noise as an instrument with a faulty tongue.
To breathe making a noise as when one has a cold, to pass air through the nose with noise.
(from Yamana English Dictionary – a Dictionary of the Speech of Tierra del Fuego, by Reverend Thomas Bridges, 1865)
Voice and terrain
Early travellers encountering Tierra del Fuego and its inhabitants had comments about the particular sound of their language(s). Written accounts, dictionaries and recordings reveal fascinating insights in to cultures that are deeply entangled with their natural habitat.
This project grew out of a commitment to those entanglements and attempts to trace exchanges between cultural features and material properties of the location. In particular language-landscape links that go beyond mere vocabulary encapsulations of topography, seeking instead elemental imprints of terrain and climate on the sonority of spoken words.
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