MACDOWELL AUTUMNAL LISTENING TRAILS

Two Autumnal Listening Trails, were designed and constructed at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire over nine weeks in Autumn, 2004. The first passed through a field of varied elevations and plant communities, an old red pine plantation tract, another field, and edge vegetation. The other, a woodland path, passed through variously forested areas as it went down one 80 foot slope and up a 60 foot one - communities of mixed coniferous and hardwood, hemlock, bottomland birch, ash and beech to circumnavigate an old fire pond, from which the one continuously flowing stream found on MacDowell's 400+ acres issues forth.

The locations, courses, and design of the trails derived from intensive research and observation during my MacDowell residency, as well as from memories of walks on the property during a previous residency in Spring of 2003. This landscape encompasses many sonorous eco-niches, deriving from topography, geology, soils, moisture, prevailing winds, and plant and animal communities. These eco-niches’ sounds are constantly changing over the course of a day, a season, and seasons, due to changes in light, temperature, wind, and climatic conditions.

I originally imagined I would mark and amplify particular sounds with listening devices and structures, but I discovered that many of the landscape sounds were ambient, and thus determined that their indication should be more general. The trail posts thus acquired an unanticipated importance. They evolved to not only indicated the path, as traditional trail posts do, but also, through their placement, to mark transitions in ambient landscape sounds and the associated land forms and eco-niches fostering them. Words stenciled on the posts' sides and maps and images on their caps provided cues to listening, and to the character and sources of what to listen for, as well as information concerning the conditions that might alter sounds, and indication where one was in the trail and larger landscape. The colors of the posts, each post four different colors, but all uniform for each trail, were carefully chosen based on colors of the landscape in which they were placed, and the color of the posts' stenciled lettering was intended to be equally subtle -- if not more so.

The field and pine trail included two listening devices: one some 45 feet up a red pine from where the sound of rustling needles is sent down PVC pipe to the listener on the ground ; the other at the end of the trail, some 35 feet up a quaking aspen, similarly providing a bird's ear experience of aspen leaves' tremulous shake in the wind. The woodland trail included four listening devices: one near the top of the wind-swept hill where the trail begins, some 20 feet up a young oak, capturing both the leaves’ rustle and the tree’s creaking sway in the wind; one along an intermittent hillside stream; one some 15 feet up a young beech on the far hillside; and one amplifying three sites on a fire pond stream.